Honoring my scars – When rejection doesn’t feel like redirection

2 February 2023
Garima Behal Written by Garima Behal
Garima Behal

Garima Behal

Garima is a copywriter and content writer with a penchant for...


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‘Word by Word’ is a column by Garima Behal on learning to ride the highs and lows of everyday life

I still remember everything clearly. Like a movie I’ve watched too many times. Only, this wasn’t a make-believe drama on the reel. The drama was real. And it was unfolding around me, as if in slow motion, while I stood frozen.

The results were out. Seven months of fanatic preparation. Three rounds of selection. One of India’s toughest government jobs to crack, with nearly 1,333 candidates vying for one seat. My performance, by my own impossibly high standards, had been stellar. 

Yet, the qualification list did not have my roll number. And just like that, my world came undone. What stood between me and my dream job—working for India’s central bank—was a number. I missed qualification by 0.75.

Until then, I used to believe that losing love was the worst kind of heartbreak possible. Now, I know that losing your greatest shot at your dream role by less than one mark tops the list. 

If I were anyone other than myself, I would have gotten over it sooner. “It’s just an exam,” I would have told myself. “It doesn’t define me. And I can always retake it. What’s the big deal?”

Only, it was the biggest deal to my 23-year-old self, her most ambitious hope. And it was dissolving into thin air, no matter how hard she tried to clutch onto it. 

A dignified acceptance of failure was impossible when I hadn’t ever needed to learn how to process it. I was confident (arrogant?), academically brilliant, a straight-A student…a university topper, for God’s sake. I had given up traveling, meeting friends, and reading fiction—everything that had made my life joyful—to prepare for this exam. And it was all rolling down my face in torrential tears. Grace? You bet it wasn’t even the last thing on my mind. 

I wanted the central bank. I wanted it so much that it hurt me in the chest. I felt like the sand of solidity was shifting beneath my feet because of all the overpowering waves of sorrow. 

Because to some of us, rejection doesn’t feel like redirection. 

Not in the beginning, anyway. Rejection feels claustrophobic, as if the entire world has decided to close in on us. It feels as if the earth and our lungs are indefinitely out of air. It feels like dying. Rejection does not feel like the gift every motivational speaker tells you it is.

My brain was short-circuiting. So, I gathered whatever I could of myself and boarded the metro home from work. On the way, I called up my family and my closest friends. I howled, screamed, and cried in plain view on public transport. I didn’t care if people watched, stared, pointed, or whispered. My world had crashed right at my feet. What the hell did they know?

By the end of the final call, there was finally room for feelings other than grief. I had made the disappointment real enough for myself. I had failed. It was done. Nothing would change it. 

I had never gone through the five stages of grief so quickly. Denial. Anger. Depression. Bargaining. Acceptance. I still oscillate between the second and fifth, four years later. I did not retake the exam. Maybe it’s cowardly to want to protect myself from all that rejection a second time. Perhaps, it’s courageous. I’ll never know for sure. 

What I do know for sure is that the universe has an inexhaustible supply of lessons packaged in misleading gifts of apparent tragedy. 

I, a person who always hated numbers, wanted to naively devote her whole life to them through this job. I had talked myself into enjoying decoding GDP growth and inflation rates and trade deficits and recession projections and whatnot. I dreamt of sitting behind a desk, buried in paperwork, when I am so restless that I stand up and stretch and walk a few paces every 15 minutes and skip all sorts of fine print (yes, even on financial documents; especially on financial documents). And I almost childishly believed it would bring me the things we all chase so hungrily after—money, happiness, and repute. 

I knew I had the brains for the job. But I never, not once, paused to consider if I had the heart. The results were a mistake, maybe. But what if they had saved me from making a bigger one?

It’s only in hindsight that the saying ‘rejection is redirection’ makes some semblance of sense to me. 

Just as the eye of the hurricane never knows of the devastation caused by the storm, only the ravaged coasts bear witness to it. Agonizing pain? Now that’s always been a precursor to poetry for me. So yeah, the rejection ended up being a beautiful fork in the road of my life, one which has led me to spend my days doing what I have loved ever since I was a 9-year-old: writing. Yeah, I am incredibly grateful for it. 

And yet, there are days it still haunts me. Unlike Harry Potter’s scar, which stopped tingling upon the death of his arch nemesis, Voldemort, my scars still sting. Especially because real-world institutions, unlike fictional villains, don’t die. And when they are institutions of national importance, they pop up unexpectedly in every city you escape to, making the memory hit you like a speeding truck. 

What do you do when you refuse to accept failure with grace? You accept it without. You stare at the buildings, think of the people in those buildings, think of the examiners, and you whisper a measured, pointed, powerful f***-you to them from the bottom of the very heart they broke. Someday the heartfelt fuck-you may finally transform into a heartfelt thank-you. But for now, it’s okay. It’s okay because it’s how you get to honor your scars.

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author’s own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of MyndStories.

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