Bumps, no's and the road ahead

In February, the senior class hosted the 100 Days Dance to celebrate (lament) the milestone of 100 days until graduation. Then, a couple of minutes passed, and yesterday my friend texted me an invitation to a 50-day party taking place this Friday. 

I’m now putting my foot down and asking that nobody alert me of any other function named after the number of days we have left — I’d love to stay oblivious to this countdown. 

Hovering around what I can now begrudgingly identify as the 50-day mark, I’ve been spending a lot of time on the 10th floor of Hes while eating a lot of ABP sandwiches, and I’ve been recasting my mind upon what’s most been occupying it recently. There’s been a pretty clear front-runner, and it’s something I normally don’t even choose to acknowledge — rejection. 

There is a predictability in our conversations lately, similar to the predictability they had during our first weeks of freshman year. Back then, it was tirelessly reciting the “ND intro” consisting of dorm, major and hometown, the conversation most likely taking place in a packed dorm room characterized by the distinctive overstimulation of obnoxiously red LED lights, twenty simultaneous conversations over Mo Bamba playing from a JBL Flip placed atop a mini fridge and trying to remember that one classmate’s name from Moreau. 

Now, it’s predictable in a much less exhilarating way— post-grad plans. 

Through conversations with my peers, the variety in their paths is clear: grad school, full-time jobs, fellowships, service, uncertainty. Common themes seem to span contentment, indifference, confusion, excitement, doubts. 

Rejection seems to stand out among these themes in that we all seem to be terrified of discussing it, despite the fact that everyone’s probably faced it at some point, and many of us are braving it now. 

Last week, Notre Dame shared that it completed admissions for its newest class with an acceptance rate of 9%. Annually, these numbers come back around and remind us to appreciate being here — LED-lit dorm parties, ABP sandwiches and all. To recognize not only the yes that brought us to where we are now, but the no’s too — all those bumps in the road we may have thought were so very daunting.

Bumps in my road, after which I not only survived but thrived: 

1. The 1975’s synth angst, as it so often soundtracked my high school years, is blaring, but it’s not enough to drown out the nauseating doom I’m feeling. I’m trying to justify this doom, searching for some deeper rationale other than the simple email rejecting me from what I always thought was my dream school. Frankly, I’m not shocked, but I am devastated. I’ve poured four years into the IB diploma, buried my head in past papers and endured the learner profile being etched into my brain (inquirer, knowledgeable, thinker, communicator, principled, open-minded, caring, risk-taker, balanced). Most of the time, I identify with none of those things, maybe one or two on a good day. Maybe that’s why I’m staring at a rejection letter. I don’t leave my room for two days. At some point later, though, I’ll be writing love letters to a corner of northern Indiana.
2. Two months into my semester at college, I sit in a stuffy, fluorescently-lit DeBart classroom and try not to sob. In front of me is a returned midterm exam, and I’ve gotten a grade that’s by far the worst I’ve ever received in my life. I sprint back to McGlinn and immediately start spiraling. I’m going to fail out of Notre Dame. I’m going to fail out of my dream school 2.0. Forever, everyone, everywhere, was always going to know that I was well below the class median in my fundamentals of accounting abilities. I can’t stop obsessing over the number. In the single-stall bathroom at the end of the hallway on the fourth floor, I make it bigger and bigger. Spoiler: there will be worse exams. 

This list is condensed to two for point-making and relatability purposes, but they span far longer — and while I would have guessed I would have obsessed over each item on the list forever, I haven’t thought about most of these things in ages. 

I’m a born catastrophizer. Sometimes, when I come across a bump in the road, my instinctive response is to slam on the brakes and convince myself that the bump is actually a mountain, after which it is a cliff, after which there is simply no more road. 

This tendency translates into several things. The first is that it can be difficult for me to detach from certain verdicts we encounter in life, the ones that involve facing a prognosis, a dichotomy, a yes or a no — rejection versus whatever its counterpart may be in a given situation — acceptance, a job, a grade, a seat at the table. In the spirit of complete candor, ultimately, in said situation, the latter is often some form of validation. 

The second is that while this candor might be jolting, I feel it gives me the credentials to offer my two cents on the matter. I’ve experienced several of these verdicts that landed on a no — rejections which, through my innate gift for catastrophizing, I dramatized, mourned, flipped out over, then ultimately accepted and came to peace with. In fact, I not only came to peace with them, but I also sometimes think that each rejection may have acted as a redirection of my life to alternative things that have actually been working out pretty great. 

And yes, maybe it’s just me buying into a cliche, a coping mechanism. 

But what if I told you that whatever you may be confronting right now doesn’t have anything to do with your intelligence, your kindness, your grit, your value? That it’s really just one extra step you’ve taken towards your next yes? What if I told you that a rejection does not define you?

I think that my friends are some of the smartest, coolest, most charming people in the entire world. And when they’re down about rejection, I’d happily be the first to tell them these things, and I’d do it so easily because I believe them to be true with my entire heart. 

But for some reason, they can be so much harder to believe when I’m trying to tell them to myself. When I’m struggling with this, I like to think of the days I thought a no was the end of my road, when the bumps felt like mountains, and remind myself that I not only survived but thrived. 

Maybe at this 50-day party, I will take an obnoxious amount of film photos of my friends and get emotional over how beautiful they are. Then, after that, it’s the great unknown filled with the whimsy of yes’s and no’s — arbitrary, meritocratic or whatever else. 

What I’ll try to do is I’ll try to start cutting myself some slack. And you should, too, because for each no we’ll be up against, we have plenty of yeses under our belts already, and I know you’ve got people who’d vouch for you. 

Because, as it turns out, the bumps are just bumps.