A squelching noise makes me open my eyes. A little black face looks up at me, wrinkled snout settling back into a permanent scowl now that the yawn is out. Our French bulldog cocks her head, like she knows something’s not right. I close my eyes and pull the blanket closer to my chin.
I want the feelings to stop. Rejection. Not good enough. Failure. I feel it physically. Shudders that start in my guts and radiate out into my arms and legs. A weight pressing on my chest. My eyes sting behind clenched lids.
My entry isn’t moving to the next round in the XPrize competition.
All my effort led nowhere. Hours and hours of time and hundreds, maybe thousands, of dollars, all for nothing.
The announcement date hasn’t passed but I know my invite won’t come.
I received an email saying they’d got my submission and encouraging me to continue interacting in the Slack channel. I know what it means. The video I made hasn’t passed the initial vetting stage where the reviewers decide which ones should be seen by Neil deGrasse Tyson and Neal Stephenson and the other high profile judges. It’s been tossed in with the pile on the cutting room floor. I feel it in my bones.
Now it’s just a matter of waiting for the official date when they write to say that everyone can make their videos public.
It’s OK, I hear everyone say. It’s good to try. Those other teams had experience and budgets. And teams. Maybe your story was too far from Earth. Maybe it wasn’t polished enough. Maybe it’s too loaded with content. Maybe, maybe, maybe.
But all my body knows is failure and rejection. It doesn’t care about all that other stuff. It wants desperately to be accepted and loved. For my creativity to be embraced.
Toxic thoughts fill my mind. I should quit creating. I should remove myself from the projects I’m involved in. I’m no use in this world. I should stick to consuming content, not creating it.
And then the noise clears for just a moment. Just long enough. And in that gap, one question surfaces above all the noise in my head, like a beam of sunlight breaking through the clouds: “Who do you want to be?”
My eyes spring open.
That’s when I understand. This is the moment I get to choose. Life is pushing me down, it happens; how I respond will be part of my story. Not to anyone else. No one else is here. Just to me. Who am I in the moment when I’m hurting the most?
I throw the blanket aside and swivel onto my butt. My socked feet land next to the dog, still seated quietly beside the bed.
Briskly, I pull off one layer after another until I’m standing topless in front of the mirror. I take a deep breath and lower my eyebrows, pinching my lips tight. Squaring my shoulders, I step into the wardrobe and pull on a sports bra and put my shirts back on. I change into tight pants and tie my hair up in a high ponytail.
I straighten and exhale audibly.
Giving the dog’s head a ruffle, I turn and walk out of the room. She trots after me and then pauses, clearly disappointed as I walk out of the house and close the front door behind me.
No headphones. No water bottle. No phone. No wallet.
Just me and the pavement.
I haven’t run in weeks.
It burns after only a few hundred meters. Push through, I say to myself. Life isn’t meant to be easy.
Somewhere in the back of my mind, I keep hearing that same question in different forms. “Who do you want to be? Who are you in this moment? Who are you when it hurts?”
As my legs start to ache, I let myself feel the physical pain, hoping it will clear some of the emotional pain. The road inclines as I reach the first hill and my breathing becomes labored. I feel the urge to stop, it’s fine to walk. Just breathing the air is enough, isn’t it? I push on. One leg after another, pumping as hard as I can. Saliva pools in my mouth and I spit it onto the nature strip in a thick wet glob. A strand sticks to my chin and I wipe it with the back of my arm. My heartbeat pounds in my ears. My breathing sounds uneven and strains against my throat.
I reach the park and turn left to join the perimeter path. Joggers with long legs and short shorts stride like gazelles past me.
I puff and pant and keep moving.
I arrive at the monkey bars and slow down, looking up. I used to do four lengths in a row. Then they took them down to rebuild and I got out of practice. Lately, I’ve had trouble getting across more than once.
Go.
I jump up and hold on. Reach for the next bar. Then bring my second hand to the first. Can I skip a bar? I try, and don’t fall. Hand over hand, I get across the first time. I still have power in me. I turn around and go back the other way. Will two be enough? No. I reach the beginning again and continue for a third length. At the end, I drop.
I lean forward and stretch out my shoulders, breathing heavily.
And then jump back up. My hands sting. I never do two sets. Could my defeat be making me stronger? Seems ridiculous.
But when I come to the last bar, I swing out and then put another hand up and turn and continue into a second lap. Reaching the bars on the other end, I pause, then lift my feet above my head and flip over and drop to land in a crouch.
My breath is steadier now. I rise and turn back to the running path.
It takes a while, but finally I settle into a rhythm and the voice telling me to stop and walk quiets. I jog and jog. I finish the lap of the park and keep going.
The pain in my body starts to feel nice. The intensity in my guts and the pressure in my chest start to recede.
I try to remember how happy I was on the day I submitted. How hard the process of learning had been and how proud I’d been of the result.
Just a few days separates me now from me then. Glowing. High on creativity.
I couldn’t stop watching those three minutes of footage over and over again.
Now, I never want to see it again.
Maybe I shouldn’t have got my hopes up, but you can’t do this kind of thing without hope. You can’t make a 3-minute trailer from nothing without believing. I didn’t have much hope or expectation and maybe that worked against me. Would it have hurt less if my hopes were higher? It’d probably feel the same. Maybe I should have expected more!
The last stretch of the park is calm. The hill seems lower on the way home. Coming down the other side is easy, like falling.
Reaching home, I sink down into a stretch behind the couch and lean my head onto the leather-covered cushion, closing my eyes again.
Rejected I may be, but that doesn’t define me.
This is life. Living means experiencing the highs but also the lows.
Not trying is easier. Doing nothing is painless.
I made myself vulnerable and I got cut down.
Who cares?
Only me.
The world doesn’t owe me success. No one owes me recognition or approval.
For years, my motto was “Feel the fear and do it anyway.”
Now, I have to add “Feel the pain and do it anyway.”
The pain tells me I’m alive. My body is responsive, full of emotion and potential.
I know the way back to happiness.
Work. Creativity. Art.
Supporting others.
And strength. Endurance. Flexibility.
I’ll keep thinking about building a wonderful world and how we can thrive without destroying ourselves, because that’s what this competition was really about.
I’ve been watching the other entries as they become public on YouTube. There are lots of amazing stories, concepts, and visions. They say a lot about who we are as a species and where we want to go.
I was going to write about them today. But this is what came out.
I guess that’s OK.
Maybe next time.
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