Note from Dylan

Shortly after I graduated college, I sat down on my bed and wrote an essay called “The Courtesy of Rejection.” A lifelong Newsweek reader, I had written it specifically for their column “My Turn,” in which guest authors (read: the rest of us pedestrians) submit short essays about particular life experiences. I thought even if they never acknowledged my existence, they’d prove my point, so that would be some consolation.

A month and a half later, about three weeks before the economy collapsed, I got a call from an editor saying they’d like to publish the essay. I met with a team to do a photo-shoot a few days after that (no, seriously—a photo shoot), and I worked closely with an editor to perfect the essay for print. It wasn’t just the idea of national publication that made me deliriously happy—actually being paid to write seemed like some sort of miracle—but that museum directors might read it, deduce I was brilliant, and hire me. I signed the contract and faxed it in, believing everything was about to start going right.

(Cue the dire music.)

Three days before the essay was set to be published, one of the senior editors cut it without any explanation. The editor with whom I had been working told me over the phone. She was very kind as I tried (and failed) not to cry and suggested maybe taking a different direction with the essay, but I think we both knew that I wasn’t going to be published in the magazine. I had spent the last few months (and would yet spend several more) being rejected, but that one I think was the most painful from that year.

Understandably, my readership of Newsweek ended abruptly. Don’t get me wrong: I mourn for the print media, but my attitude towards that particular magazine became distinctly unsympathetic. My friends, bless their hearts, didn’t ask when the essay I had been so ecstatic to have published would appear, and I didn’t have the heart left to tell them that it never would.
I thought of that essay recently, more than a year now into the job I eventually got. I knew it was a bad fit even while I was interviewing, but when the offer came, I bounced off the walls anyway, because it was the opposite of rejection—finally. So now, many paradigm shifts later, I proudly publish one of my original essays.

Take that, Newsweek.