How to Be a Writer When You’re Highly Sensitive to Rejection

No writer enjoys rejection, but we are reminded at regular intervals—on social media, in writer’s advice columns, and in think pieces—that rejection is part of the process and we shouldn’t take it personally. Rejection is so much a fixture of the writing world that we are told to get our work out there by aiming for a hundred rejections a year. If you don’t reach the one hundred–rejections milestone, is your hustle really up to scratch? There is even a subgenre of lit-mags and Twitter accounts dedicated to the heartbreak of rejection, including Rejection Letters and Sobmittable.

Rejection isn’t easy for anyone, but what do you do when you’re a writer whose brain has been conditioned to receive rejection as further evidence of your failure as a human being?

Rejection sensitive dysphoria is a subclinical condition associated with ADHD and, to a lesser extent, autism. It is believed to be caused by the overwhelming and disproportionate negative messaging neurodivergent people have received since childhood. Before they are ten, children with ADHD experience an estimated twenty thousand more negative messages than their neurotypical peers in school alone. A sensitivity to this negative messaging builds up over a lifetime of rejection at home, in school, and from peers.

Characterized as a disproportionate emotional and nervous system response to actual rejection—and even perceived rejection—RSD can provoke intense emotional and physical distress. As someone who deals with this condition, it can feel like a particular kind of masochism trying to be a published writer. Throughout my writing journey, I’ve been working hard to cope with the inevitability of rejection in ways that work for me, despite my elevated sensitivities. I hope that what I’ve learned can help anyone cope with rejection in ways that feel most healthy to them.

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As a neurodivergent woman (I enjoy the magic combination of autistic and ADHD), rejection has been a feature of my life from my earliest years, made all the harder because no one—least of all me—knew I was neurodivergent until recently. Rejection manifested in my parents’ disapproval of an infinite number of behaviours and emotional responses, many of which I had no control over and which escalated to active exclusion from family activities as I got older. In school, most teachers tolerated my presence because of my good grades but made it clear they did not like me or my opinions. With peers, I repeatedly found myself falling out of friend groups, experiencing disdain from classmates for my ill-concealed nerdish tendencies, and rarely receiving invites to classmates’ houses and parties. In romance, it meant either long bouts of involuntary singledom or clinging to deeply problematic people long after the expiration date of our relationship had passed.

When it came to writing, it meant that, for the longest time, I did not share my work with anyone—or even allow myself to pursue the writing goals I had so long dreamed of, like writing short stories or a novel. I didn’t think I was good enough, that I had anything valuable to say, or that anyone would be interested in reading my words.

I’ve developed many resources over the years to mitigate the sting of rejection, including denial, gravitating to other neurodivergent folks who are more accepting of difference, and chasing external validation through academic, professional, and writing pursuits. The latter has been reasonably effective due to modest successes in academia and writing, but it has also meant that my perception of my own self-worth is too often tied to these external achievements. Despite many years of therapy, rejection—whether real or perceived—continues to be my Achilles’ heel, often causing far more emotional distress than the circumstances merit. Even now that I am publishing on a fairly regular basis, I am still plagued by the voice of my imposter telling me I’ve no right to take up this space. Rejection continues to be the one aspect of publishing that is hardest for me to manage.

An editor’s rejection, whether to a pitch or finished piece, can be paralyzing, leaving me to doubt not only my writing but my worth as a human being. RSD makes it difficult—sometimes impossible—to distinguish the no an article, story, or essay gets from a rejection of my very existence. Sometimes the rejection, no matter how positive or encouraging, tiered or personalised, triggers my worst fears about myself, my abilities, and my aspirations for writing. A rejection can stir up my deepest insecurities about my own legitimacy and right to express myself, reinforced over a lifetime of people telling me I was somehow wrong or unwelcome.

Some rejections, like the New Yorker’s ghosting or the Paris Review’s curt “thanks but no thanks,” are so expected I can laugh and move on. But other rejections can feel almost personal. As someone who writes a lot of creative nonfiction, using writing to process some of the most traumatic moments in my life and make something beautiful from them, a rejection to work like this feels like a rejection of both myself and the validity of my story. I get knots in my stomach, feel nauseous, and lose my appetite, and I can lose my concentration and ability to think or work on anything else for hours or sometimes days. It can be impossible to help myself see that it might be simply a case of not-quite-the-right journal, not-quite-the-right time—or that maybe the piece still needs a little work. My response is never predictable. I have extremes of thinking I am the best but also the worst—neither of which is the case most of the time—and it can be difficult to regulate these expectations and maintain myself on more balanced middle ground. My ability to cope varies substantially with other factors in my life: ever-fluctuating levels of confidence, self-esteem and insecurity, general health, sleep disturbance, general stress levels, and autistic burnout. There are days I send out five more submissions to get me over the rejection slump, and there are days I lose all will to get out of bed if I make the mistake of checking my inbox for early morning rejection bombs.

Since my diagnosis last year, and the subsequent deep dive into the world of neurodivergence, I began to realize that my response to the run-of-the-mill literary rejections was often far more extreme than the responses of my peers. They seemed to be able to brush their rejections off and move on with ease while I could spend days or weeks wallowing in my own sense of failure. It was through the online neurodivergent community that I first came across the term RSD, and it seemed to capture my experience exactly. Having a name for it and knowing the reasons behind it has been immensely helpful in learning how to better manage rejection without punishing myself.

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Like many writers, most of my writing life has been conducted as a solitary affair, starting with the diaries I wrote throughout my adolescence to my first attempts at blogging and publishing in student media with minimal editorial oversight. It was only when I became more ambitious and started sending articles out to newspapers and journals and pitching editors that I encountered any real critique. It wasn’t always easy for me to take: The first few times I had an article picked apart and put back together by an editor, it really stung. I struggled to find a balance between having the confidence to defend my creative choices and retreating into defensiveness.

A rejection can stir up my deepest insecurities about my own legitimacy and right to express myself.

With time and experience, I’ve learned to get better at working with editors. I can see their comments and critiques—for the most part—as a way to improve my writing, pushing me toward deeper emotional truths, more refined language, or greater clarity of ideas. Sometimes this has meant learning to let go of my darlings to meet an editor halfway and get the piece out there. It has also meant realizing that another person’s perspective can help me see things that were missing or the different directions I might take a piece of writing.

As I began to move away from academic and journalistic into creative writing, I realized I would benefit from taking classes and joining a writing group. And for the most part, these, too, have been really enriching experiences, pushing me to improve and become more comfortable with constructive criticism.

This summer, however, I ended up taking three classes back-to-back over a two-month period, ending with a weeklong intensive summer school. While two of these classes felt like very safe, queer-centred, and neurodivergent-friendly spaces, focused on reading, craft, and constructive critique, the summer school involved three hours straight of giving and receiving feedback for five consecutive days. I saw the all-too-familiar dynamic of mismatched communication styles across neurotypes develop over the week, and my anxiety flared. By Friday afternoon, my confidence was at rock bottom. I felt oversaturated with critique and struggled to separate the useful from the not-so-useful. There were too many voices in my head, and I no longer trusted my own instincts.

It was a lesson in moderating my exposure to those environments: respecting the limits of my own capacities for potentially straining social interaction, learning to filter out the unhelpful voices, and trusting my instincts. I realized that, while it can be great to participate in prestigious literary spaces and have yourself and your work challenged, perhaps my current emotional needs mean it’s more important for me to cultivate spaces where the emphasis is as much on supporting each other through the ups and downs of writing as it is on critique.

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Writing, pitching, submitting, and publication are a hell of an emotional rollercoaster. Despite the sometimes-paralyzing self-doubt, I’m hooked. My dopamine-starved brain receives multiple hits throughout the process: the anticipation of a response can, in itself, give me a buzz; the email that drops saying my pitch or essay or story has been accepted; the green button on Submittable; publication day; the likes, the shares, the comments. At thirty-seven and with a moderate amount of decent publications under my belt, there is still no greater thrill for me than seeing my words in print, whether online or on paper. The satisfaction of knowing my words have connected with someone, somewhere—on a page or across cyberspace—is incomparable.

Writing is my most enduring “special interest”; it’s a medium that allows me to explore my many other more transient interests. It is a vital tool for me in processing my often-hard-to-decipher emotions, as well as my trauma. I’m smart and reasonably well-read, but, in conversation, unless I feel very comfortable with the person, I’m not actually very articulate. I lose words and ideas, I get tongue-tied, I’m easily distracted, easily worked up, and too often my words don’t fully reflect what I mean—or are sometimes wilfully misinterpreted. Writing allows me to order my thoughts and say what I want in the way I want to say it with minimal space for misinterpretation. And, as time goes on, my pitches have improved and I have a better sense of where my writing might land well. And there is always the hope that maybe this one pitch, this one essay, this one story will land at the right publication, at the right time, and change my life!

So while waiting for that (unlikely) scenario to manifest, I know I need to find ways to manage my submission journey without completely burning out. I can stop checking my email as soon as my alarm goes off. I can cultivate the writing/editorial relationships that feel enriching and constructive. I can work on building confidence in my voice and recognizing that in cases where editorial oversight is so severe that the finished product doesn’t even feel like mine, I can pull it if I no longer feel comfortable with the direction a piece has taken. I can take real time off. I can do the occasional social media detox. Most importantly, I need to continue cultivating my own sense of self-worth, independent of my work and my writing. I need to remind myself periodically that writing is not just about publishing but the joy of creating, of putting a shape to my life, my thoughts, or the lives of people who live in my imagination.

Whether you also experience RSD or if you just find yourself getting weighed down by writing rejections and feeling like you can never quite catch that break, I encourage you to figure out the spaces and routines that help you support your writing life rather than hinder it. This could look like building relationships with other writers so you can share celebrations and commiserations, targeting publications that care just as much about their writers as they do about their reputations, putting self-care first even if it means taking a break from the submissions mill, filling your TBR pile with writers who inspire and delight you, or simply finding how to recover the joy in creating that pushed you to start writing in the first place.

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