You’ve probably wondering where my blog posts are if I said I’d do one each time I faced a query rejection. And that’s a valid question. Because I have been rejected since then.

There are three reasons why I haven’t written.

1) I never received a rejection letter. It’s the end of the “if we don’t contact you by this time you’ve been passed over” period, so while I know that I’ve been rejected, it was harder to tell when it happened.

2) I’ve struggled to figure out what to write a post about, and

3) The first rejection hit way harder than I thought it would. I was expecting to be rejected for my book, and I’m used to that, but this time, I had a poem rejected, and that hurt.

I kept hoping that maybe I was wrong, that I had calculated the weeks incorrectly and there must have been a mistake. But it’s been a couple of weeks past the acceptance period, so I need to just admit my loss.

I think the poem rejection hurt more because, while I’ve never had a book published, I have had poems published, at least in local competitions. I was one of the top students in my college advanced poetry class and even got to be on a student podcast about poetry. Like with anyone, my poems didn’t start out great, but they have improved over the years, and I feel like I can write a decent one now. One that uses specific language to grapple with big emotions, that uses symbolism and imagery and honesty.

Of course, poetry publishing, like any arts field, is very subjective. And even if I and my past peers thought I was decent, that doesn’t mean I am, or that the one poem I sent in was.

It’s just funny how quickly a simple non-response of a single poem can cut down to my self-image, rocking my identity. I want to be able to define myself as a poet, but how can I if I can’t get a single poem published post-college?

I keep grasping at occupation titles as if one will define me. “If I can just be a poet,” I tell myself, “a really good poet, then I will have purpose and joy.” Or, I think, “If I can be a writer, a published one, then I can stop striving and feel great about myself.” “If there was just some sort of job I can introduce myself with that would be met with public approval, then I would have done something with my life.” Not being able to claim “poet” anymore is disheartening.

Of course, whether my poetry is published doesn’t change my identity before God. My resumé isn’t where my worth comes from. But oh, how I want it to be.

I don’t want to be the number one bestseller for eighteen years or anything so unattainable, but I do want to have a sellable book. I want to have enough accolades that people will invite me to share on my college stage as an alumnus or ask me to do a talk at a writing conference, where I can exposit on my experience and expertise. I want to be able to actually put something on the bottom of a query letter, where the bio goes, that’s more than just a single line.

I have to remind myself that since God is less concerned about my job experience than my spiritual growth, I should be less concerned about that, too. The only title that will hold any weight post-this-life is the title “in Christ.”

And so, begrudgingly, I am reminding myself that it’s good to feel the sting of rejection sometimes. It’s like peroxide on a cut, bubbling up and cleaning out the gunk so that I can properly heal. The sting reveals my pride, my self-reliance, my misplaced hopes. And it encourages me to practice the discipline of repentance, of stripping those sins away again. And again. And again.

So, yes, I have been rejected. I am not the perfect poet I wish I could be. And that is okay, because God knows exactly who I am, flaws and all, and he is still transforming me into the person he has already decided I will be—one who looks like his Son.