Rejection, Oh That Bleeding Wound…
When Chico Buarque de Holanda wrote the lyrics for “Atrás da Porta,” he uniquely and perfectly illustrated the pain of human beings: rejection. Being “no affection, no blanket, on the rug behind the door”, left there for a “goodbye look” seems to be much worse than waking up being a cockroach. Kafka may have been more comprehensive in synthesizing in a single book all the pains arising from human existence, whereas Chico wrote music for everything, one or more for each human particularity.
Rejection is an inevitable pain
It will be felt by all of us, in the open or in an ambush” (plagiarizing Oscar Wilde, another master of pain description). Artists get a lot of inspiration from rejection, all of them may have lived it intensely. I believe there are two types of people already torn apart by being rejected: artists and individuals with low self-esteem and little self-esteem. And so, no one escapes. If when you hear that your hair is ugly the day gets even uglier, let alone hear that you were not accepted to be loved.
Some say that feeling rejected is just a figment of our imagination. There are those who say that suffering for this is the result of our lack of shame in our faces. Some say that all this is just the mother’s separation anxiety. There are endless theories and no way or remedy to avoid the urge to want someone who doesn’t want us, to suffer when this happens and to attack to see if this pain goes away. This is how Adriana Calcanhoto beautifully described in her most popular song called Lies.
And after breaking cups and scratching records, they are left with the pain and, in the case of artists, writing music and lyrics, verse and prose of the whole thing. I wanted to know who invented this collective outburst of wanting (and having to) be accepted and loved and idolized and chosen all the time. I wanted to know why Carlos Drummond de Andrade wrote that gang that ends with someone who gave up and with the tragic end of Joaquim. The Quadrilha also ended up becoming his most famous poem, because rejection is a success and is a living subject on couches, beauty salons and bar counters.
I always wonder if rejection really exists as a live energy that actually comes like a poisoned arrow, shot by the other in our direction. I still have doubts if it’s all just a big observational error. The human race is neither very capable nor very reliable to observe. We seem to see almost nothing but ourselves and the projection of our feelings. If I’m right: being rejected is nothing more than rejecting yourself – which would not mean making things any easier, nor would it serve as a plaster to treat the pain.
Aside from all this bloody wound, the situation is simple and quite common: it is just the finding of disinterest on the part of one of the parties for the other, thus generating the termination of the contract called relationship – this in case it has existed one day, otherwise it’s just the “no interest” itself. I’m being reductionist in calling relationships a contract, the metaphor is just to reflect that not liking an apartment you visit for rent doesn’t mean it’s useless – it just doesn’t fit what you need, maybe it’s too good. Being rejected has nothing to do with being bad, and thinking like that, it doesn’t hurt as much. If anyone dared to reject Chico Buarque de Holanda, let everyone dig up his poetry spilled on the floor.
After that is to follow. It’s leaving – if we weren’t that species prone to love, to desire, to suffer for not being accepted and to insist on the cultivation of certain pains. Any rejection paralyzes us, collapses us, throws us into the gutter; and there we stayed, licking that wound.
The level of suffering due to rejection is closely linked to the degree of dependence we have on the other and their perceptions of us. Free people are rare, and expensive – but it should be worth the investment, because freedom enchants and being free may mean not having time to lick wounds that will heal on their own with time. About the practical rules of coexistence between our species whose effectiveness has already been proven, one of them is: the law lives next to tolerance. It is the other’s right not to want us, it is our duty to be tolerant, accept and follow. So let’s continue making music, poems, changing clothes, eating chocolate, drinking at the counter and worshiping inside out this existence called life, of which we are hostages until proven otherwise.
