Don't Believe I'm Just Afraid of Rejection
I want to ask.
But I don't dare.
Because if I ask,
you might say no.
It sounds reasonable enough.
We are afraid of rejection,
so we avoid asking.
But—
is it really the request
that I am afraid will be rejected?
What Does a “No” Actually Reject?
I ask:
Do you like me?
You say:
No.
At its simplest,
the answer tells me only one thing:
You don't like me.
It does not tell me
whether I am worthy of being loved.
I ask:
Do you like my work?
You say:
No.
The answer tells me only this:
You don't like my work.
The work itself does not suddenly
lose some of its worth
because you said so.
I ask:
Would you give me this opportunity?
You say:
No.
That answer means:
You are not willing
to give me this opportunity.
It does not necessarily mean
I am incapable.
A “no”
can be very small.
But sometimes,
we take that “no” home
and place it inside
a completely different question.
Am I not good enough?
Someone else rejects a request.
And somehow,
we end up rejecting ourselves.
What If I Already Believe in Myself?
Perhaps the problem is not
that I don't believe in myself at all.
Quite the opposite.
I may already believe:
I am worthy of being liked.
My work is good.
I am capable of earning this opportunity.
That may be why I asked
in the first place.
But when the answer outside me
contradicts the answer inside me,
something subtle happens.
I begin to wonder:
What if I was wrong about myself?
Maybe I am not as good
as I thought I was.
Maybe my work is actually ordinary.
Maybe I have overestimated myself.
At that point,
what I want from someone else
may no longer be simply affirmation.
I want proof that:
the affirmation I gave myself
was correct.
Then What If They Say No?
There is something strange here.
Why should their answer
have the authority
to rewrite mine?
Perhaps because it is easy to forget
what question they were actually answering.
“Do I like you?”
“Do I like this work?”
“Do I want to give you this opportunity?”
The subject of those questions
has always been them.
But when their answer
comes back to us,
the question quietly changes.
“Am I worthy of being liked?”
“Is my work good?”
“Am I capable?”
Now the subject is me.
And we take someone else's answer
to a question about themselves
and use it to answer
a question about ourselves
that they were never answering
in the first place.
So I Don't Ask
As long as I don't ask,
the answer has not arrived.
You might like me.
You might appreciate my work.
You might be willing
to give me that opportunity.
And as long as those possibilities
remain alive,
my own judgment of myself
does not yet have to be challenged.
So sometimes,
what not asking protects
may be more than
the comfort of avoiding rejection.
It also protects a version of myself
that has never been contradicted
by the outside world.
A version of myself
that can still believe:
Maybe I was right.
Don't Believe
Don't believe
I'm just afraid
that my request will be rejected.
Perhaps what I really fear is this:
when your answer
is different from mine,
I don't know
whether I will still be able
to believe myself.
But when you say “no,”
which question
are you actually answering?
“Do I want you?”
or
“Are you worthy?”
They were never
the same question.
Sometimes,
we simply use
the same answer
for both.