Just cried tears of joy over a rejection letter and now my head hurts.
Yes, the rejection from Cola finally came! It got sent Thursday, but I didn't see it until last night while on call with friends, which did slightly ruin the vibes Oops. Maybe don't check your Submittable account during a social event. I obviously didn't read the actual rejection right then, and I spent the last 12 hours in a kind of soft doom spiral wondering if any of my work is good enough, if it will ever be good enough, if I need to be doing more, what I can be doing differently, etc...All I could say to encourage myself then was, "as least this doesn't feel as bad as it did last time."
I've written a lot about how much I hate opening up rejections, but I make myself do it now. I type them up and hang them on my wall, which started as some sort of exercise in masochism, but has actually turned out to be very helpful, because there's something about physically typing those words that reminds you what they are--just a few words, written by a person like you, and nothing to feel all that bad about. So I got the paper ready and opened the message up with the window shrunk as small as possible in the corner of the screen, counted to five, and read it between the slats of my fingers. And then I started Weeping, because it's not just a rejection, but a soft rejection.
Every rejection I've gotten before this one has been a canned, unpersonalized response. It's impossible for me to know how much of this one is just form, but it's my first time getting that sentence I've been craving almost as much as an acceptance: "We very much hope you'll submit to us again in the future." They also named the poem they like the most (which is actually the one that I just threw in to fill out the packet, which shows how little I know about my own work!)
I want to celebrate! I want to tell people! I want to throw confetti in the air over what is materially indistinguishable from an ordinary rejection!! It's the first real sign that this is something worth pursuing, and it's not like it came from the New Yorker, but it is a lit mag with less than a 2% acceptance rate. Now that number feels approachable. "Never In A Million Years" has turned into "Maybe Next Year." Confetti!!
I need to be much better with future submissions in a few ways. First, not like it matters much, but I should probably be putting more than two seconds of thought into my cover letters; And second and much more importantly, I need to personalize my packets more to the particular publications I'm looking at, something which will become much easier the more good stuff I write. Cola has more of a Mikko Harvey thing going, so of course they liked my most Mikko Harvey poem, even if I'm meh about it. I should be noting these things before I hit the submit button!! And learning that much means I'm getting better, too.
This too is Akane-Banashi... I kinda feel like Hikaru after her last performance at the Karaku cup, when she gets all giddy over Issho praising her performance, even though she doesn't actually win the competition. Also thinking again about Karashi and her, and how losing that competition was literally the thing that made both of their careers--that Karashi in particular would never have become such a good perfomer if he had won that year. So, yk. When all five of my active packets come back with rejection letters, that's actually exactly what has to happen. Or I'd never get any better.