A hole that is still gaping
“Don’t ever contact us again!”
The wave of impatience on top of which she found herself opening the coveted message subsided on reading this lone phrase and left her with a sense of emptiness in her mind and stomach.
The entire response to her restaurant’s presentation email was this blunt and brief expression of rejection: no salutation, closing, or signature.
The imperative tone and the vague threat implied in this email, which lacked any element of professional correspondence, offended her. She had spent so many hours of research to create a list with email addresses of European travel agencies for golf players to present them with the little restaurant she runs in one of their destinations. She studied the ethics of business correspondence and how to write a professional yet engaging presentation of her reliable business. Not even in her worst-case scenarios did she expect such a negative and angry reply from them.
No response was the worst expected.
She felt naïve and, for that, angry with herself. She wondered how it crossed her mind that even one of them would show an interest. In that such rejection, so abruptly expressed, she felt the blaming for her audacity to address these fancy travel agencies, an amateur cook introducing her little restaurant somewhere in Greece, in the middle of nowhere.
Her face turned red, and she felt it burning. In her ears, her pulse was pounding, and her stomach sank.
The need for immediate relief swept over her. She longed for the comfort a piece of almond chocolate provides from the very second you bite into it and fill your mouth with almond and melting chocolate crumbs. She headed for the kitchen when suddenly it hit her! She had emptied the house of everything sweet the day before.
Broccoli, carrots, apples, and other vegetables would be her weapons in the war against sugar cravings from that day on. For years she was reading specialists, suggesting them as an excellent substitute. So, she decided that the moment had come to listen to them, along with those who assured her that a positive mindset brings positive results.
There, besides freeing herself from sugar, she made another decision too. To shift from her usual stressful state of “who am I to present myself as a good food experience creator” to “why not?”
“If I won’t introduce myself, who will do it for me? Waiting to be discovered, I will go bankrupt. And in the end, what has I got to lose?” she parroted the preaching of the success gurus while sending the emails to the addresses she worked so hard to gather.
Yet the answer that did not take long was, “Don’t ever contact us again!”
That blasted phrase popped into her mind the following days in the middle of whatever she was doing. And every time, she tasted the same feeling of discouragement, the same pain rejection causes each time. She couldn’t let it go.
“So, you’re faced with a negative response to a business presentation you gave to a stranger you’ll probably never meet. Α response that has no effect whatsoever. You didn’t have something you lost. You only didn’t gain anything,” her therapist summarized to continue asking, “What does make it so painful?”
“It is like someone slammed the door rudely in my face. It is a brutal rejection,” she answered.
“What does rejection mean to you?”
“That I am not good enough. That I don’t belong.”
“And how does that make you feel?”
“Scared!”
“Scared of what?”
“Of being alone, unseen, unaccepted, helpless!”
She was surprised that the words came out of her mouth effortlessly and stayed silent for a few seconds, just long enough to realize them. Then, with a half-smile, she looked at her therapist and said: “Ok, ok, I see! Let’s welcome the familiar pattern again.” She felt relief, recognizing her fear of enoughness and, at the same time, disappointed that it was still so deep-rooted inside her.
On her return home, a phrase she had heard recently came to her mind again and again:
It will stay in your face until you handle it with grace (Les Brown).
Entering the house, she went straight to her office. “Enough with this rejection story,” she said to herself. Feeling fed up, she finally put on the headphones, turned on the music, picked up the list, and started sending the emails from where she had left off seven days ago.
She didn’t want to write off the time and effort she dedicated to this email marketing plan, leaving it unfinished due to a reaction. Not to wonder someday if there would have been an answer in the case she had sent them.
The outcome didn’t matter to her so much anymore. It took its proper dimensions as one of the three-four practices she had to combine to publicize her work and position her business effectively.
By the end, she felt as if she had finally let go of a balloon that her hand had grown tired of holding.
