A few weeks ago, I Twittered the following:
Something strange has happened. Being rejected by Yale has made me feel better about myself, rather than worse. I can’t explain this.
Which is actually true. In some ways, applying to graduate school is like going to the Olympics. Some people win the gold medal, and other are just happy to hang out at the Olympic Village and have the chance to compete. So far I haven’t made it into any of my schools, but I’ve spent the last four months working very intensely on my writing and on my sense of myself as a writer. Aside from simply producing content - a very good new play, which I’ve realized is part of a tryptich about (what else?) failure - I’ve had the chance to clarify for myself what I do, why I do it, and that I’m going to keep doing it.
Some people win a gold medal, others are just happy to be at the party.
And then yesterday, a friend told me that I’d made it onto The Daily Beast, which I have to admit is one of my favorite websites. They ran a bunch of recent Tweets about college and grad school rejects, with the accompanying text: As the college rejection letters pour in, Twitter boards are lighting up, proving brevity can be the soul of agony, too.
Some of us are taking the rejection better than others. You can read all of the Tweets here. I love the guy who gets turned down by Waterloo, but gets into Harvard. What, like that’s hard?