How to deal with rejection...

So, I've decided to add some philosophical babble to this blog to give some food for thought to the abstract minded. Also partly because I like to think I'm a philosopher to some extent,...maybe...Anyway, rejection is definitely one of those big things that all of us deal with at some point of time in our lives in one form or another. However, there is no prescribed method to deal with it and different people have different ways to deal with rejection. I'm going to attempt to set down some guidelines on how to deal with rejection, based either on experience or on purely abstract thinking (feel free to disagree)...

So what is rejection? From a pure feelings point of view, its something that takes us to an all time low - we feel bad, lose self-respect/self-esteem, become non-productive, antisocial and worst of all we continue feeling that way for a while. There are a few ways of dealing with rejection - all of them involving accepting what has happened and moving on -

1. Distract yourself, Escape from reality
You could sleep, watch a movie, play a sport, go work out, eat, swim or do anything to take your mind off the subject at hand and come back to it to deal with it later - when you're better equipped (emotionally). This has definitely been my way of dealing with rejection and it works - it just takes a little while to deal with rejection, but once you're beyond a certain point, you're fine.

2. Delve deeper into the reason why you got rejected
Think about the rejection - not so much how you felt at that instant of time - but why you got rejected and how you can avoid it in the future. This one is much harder to do - its much easier to shut down and not worry about anything, though this is the better way to deal with rejection. You know what you did wrong and you're ready to take it on again.

3. Express your rejection
Be creative and think about how you felt when you got rejected and express it - express how you felt. For example, write a poem about the nervousness, the anxiety, the disappointment - talk about the fact that it felt like falling off a cliff - tell people about it - go out and blog about it - throw it out for the world to listen to and that will make you feel better. Letting sad/unhappy feelings escape is liberating.

4. Do good things and be nice, help people
Go out and help people. Clean up your room - send people cards - just be nice. As hard as it might seem, doing good things will make you feel better and will automatically uplift you.

Thats all I can think of right now. A rejection isn't the end of the world - there's always tomorrow.