#0015 Taking the sting out of rejection, Part Four
Butterflies fly, right?! I mean, it's in the name...
It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s a writer taking Flight from Rejection!!
The Sympathetic Nervous System (SNS) and Parasympathetic Nervous System (PNS) are two halves in the Autonomic Nervous System (ANS). [Science loves acronyms.] The ANS takes care of heartbeat, breathing, and other sorts of automatic, or unconscious, functions. Consider them effortless (or thoughtless — which I’ll come back to with the PNS conversation in a future post).
Confession time: the SNS naming confuses me. Whenever I see the first word, “sympathetic,” I think of compassion and loyalty, not a deer in the headlights or the movie Fight Club. Anyway, the SNS is all about Fight, Flight, or Freeze reactions that our ancestors had to Big Cats and that we now have when doom scrolling social media feeds.
Once the big scary is over (assuming we’re still alive), our bodies toggle from the SNS to the PNS. We slow down, kick back, and relax, usually summarized as Rest and Digest. More on the PNS in the near future.
Back to the writer imitating a bird or a plane: That urge to take flight when the rejection comes across your email? It’s a momentary reaction, not a true and actionable way to go through life.
Imagine every time your anxiety-ridden mind screaming Flee! Run away! tricks you to really take Flight. When you stretch your wings to catch the breeze, you’re not frozen like the deer on a mountain road, so you won’t end up roadkill (so sad). There's no rage bubbling up like Bruce Banner transforming into the Hulk (outfit preservation). But as you pretend the rejection isn’t happening, you’re merely a butterfly fluttering away (goodbye). When you escape, you quit. And quitting means you miss out on ever reaching your creative self-expression goals.
It’s fine to feel like taking Flight for a moment. Okay, maybe a half hour? We are creatives, which means many of us are more sensitive than the typical human.
Rather than ruminating in this SNS reaction to the point of giving up on our dreams, we should remember: the reaction is fleeting. We need to allow our bodies to switch from this SNS reaction to a PNS — Rest and Digest — one. With some patience, we will get back on track to embrace rejection as a minor bump along the way to our creative destination. Keep dreaming BIG.
Next time: I found my Word (and support words) for 2024…