Are You Rejecting Yourself Before Others Get the Chance?

Because your answer to this tells you all you need to know

Photo by Ashley Light on Unsplash

You’ve missed out on a lot of opportunities because you’ve rejected yourself. The people or the situations who turned you down weren’t for the real version of you.

You were too afraid to rip the mask off and show your real identity.

Rejection isn’t a verdict.

It’s feedback.

Sometimes it’s about how you show up, how you present yourself, sometimes it’s about timing or compatibility, or even worse… what you’re NOT putting out there.

Whether it’s dating, relationships, careers, success, or our personal lives, rejection feels so real and intense. It can de-motivate us and cause us to spiral into the darkest abyss.

But guess what?

Rejection is all in our minds. Now, this doesn’t negate or invalidate how you’re feeling; I’m well acquainted with what it’s like to be rejected multiple times so I’m not speaking from some moral high ground.

Getting friend-zoned or completely ghosted cuts right into that ancient, primal part of our brain that loudly yells, ‘Your DNA isn’t even good enough to pass on.’

Or someone totally rejecting your idea hits at a part of the vulnerable side of us that says, ‘You fucking suck, you’re an idiot.’

It compounds and snowballs into some massive shit-storm of emotion that feels impossible to get over.

However, the more you frame yourself in your life as a victim of circumstance, the worse it’ll get. If you expect it to stop, at some point you must reverse this angle.

For the sake of this argument, let’s say you’re on a date with someone. You meet online, go on a date, and then like halfway through the other person seems to be losing interest.

You get short answers and half-hearted laughs, and now their TikTok feed is more interesting than you.

Then the next day they ghost you.

To make things worse, that big promotion you expected to get goes to someone else. And your idea that would help streamline an important process gets turned down by your boss. The reason why? It was ‘too safe and too boring.’

I know this has all been explained a million times. We all know what ‘rejection’ really means, but we still fear it. We still get consumed by it.

But let me throw a bit of nuance at you. Something you might not have heard or thought about before. Selfishness.

Have you been subconsciously looking for signs that someone wasn’t interested in you when you asked them out or when you wanted something from them because your focus was all on you?

Why do you reject people? ← I never thought of this until I kept getting rejected. This is a game-changer.

What drives you to avoid certain people or situations?

How often do you play it safe at work or in life?

What kind of energy are you projecting out there into the world?

Is it the same kind of energy you’d want to be around?

No one wants to be around toxicity

When it comes to things like dating, every rejection — if you let it — is being carried into the next interaction. You’re not meeting someone new. You’re meeting someone new plus the weight of all those past disappointments.

It shows in how you carry yourself and how you interact.

It’s no different than if you bring ‘baggage’ into a new relationship. Not only are you having to navigate the complexities of it, but all that and all the crap from an old connection.

Here’s the thing about rejection, it’s rarely about who you are. Getting back to ‘Why do you reject people,’ every time it was never about their worth as a person.

Here’s what I mean:

• I once dumped this girl because she screamed at another driver in the car, plus she said ‘I love you’ a week later (we had only seen each other for a few weeks)

• I ended a three-month relationship after she acted like a six-year-old and gave me the silent treatment for the second time after being warned about it

• I called it quits on another woman because she never made time to go out on dates

In these examples, I wasn’t thinking about their worth as people. That wasn’t on my mind at the time. It was all about how their actions were affecting me.

But we can get so bogged down in our own lives thinking that every rejection is some deeply personal thing without remembering we’re never rejecting others based on their worth.

In fact, as creatures, we’re so selfish that we reject people for our own reasons that have nothing to do with the person.

Yet, when we’re rejected, we make it about our entire being.

(This is why it’s often a good thing to get rejected because it forces our ego to learn a little humility)

Let rejection teach you a few valuable lessons

So here’s what you can do.

It’s not about trying to detach yourself from rejection or giving up entirely.

Maybe we could start to see rejection not as a judgment of our worth, but as valuable feedback. It might just be worth it to see it as crucial data for the adjustments we need to make to get what we want.

Perhaps that person who ghosted you after the first date felt uncomfortable because they could feel your anxiety.

It doesn’t make you a bad person or unlovable.

With a few tweaks, you can let go of first-date anxiety or the fear of your ideas being dismissed.

But it’s gonna have to start with you discarding that victim mindset.

Really ask yourself what the benefit of it is.

What do you gain by rejecting yourself before others do and then complaining about it?

Safety? Confirmation of some unconscious, hidden belief? Is it easier to simply avoid things even if it means stifling your own voice?

And I don’t know what those answers are for you.

You weren’t always so meek and shy

But I could guess that it wasn’t always the case. There was probably a time when you carried yourself differently, like when you were younger and more carefree.

Before all the bullshit.

Because that’s when we start to become meek and insecure. We start rejecting ourselves approach people apologetically, and expect a ‘no’ before we even ask for that raise or for that number.

There was a point in your life where you were excited and ready to face the world but then something happened. Now all you do is second-guess yourself.

You beat part of yourself into submission and tell it to get back in its cage.

Then you wonder why you feel terrible.

It all adds up. When you’re carrying all this baggage, it shows up in everything including your posture, your tone, and even your choice of words.

You’re not just approaching situations differently; you’re literally showing up as a different person. Trust me, people can tell.

So let’s remember the times we’ve rejected people. Let’s consider when we’ve chosen to not date people, let a friend go, or turned down a job.

Was it about the person’s worth itself or their energy?

Before you worry about someone rejecting you when you message someone, are you writing what you think will get a response, or what you actually want to say?

Do you tell your boss what they want to hear or what will improve things, even if it’s uncomfortable?

Actually, listen.

Ask questions you genuinely want to know the answers to. Share things you actually care about. Worst case scenario? You get rejected for being yourself rather than rejected for being a careful, curated version of yourself.

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