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Overcoming Rejection
Feb. 28th, 2019 08:47 amAbout a year and a half ago I was getting a lot of threats and other negative messages from a certain corner of the Zelda fandom, and so I wanted to counteract this negativity by being friendlier and branching out into other fandoms. An artist I’m mutuals with in another fandom had been posting about wanting to organize an art trade, so I offered to do one with her based entirely on her favorite characters in her main fandom. She flat-out rejected me.
Around the same time, a fanfic writer I admired was posting about how she was worried that what she created didn’t mean anything to anyone, so I drew fan art of one of her stories with a short caption saying how much I loved her work. She liked it, but she didn’t comment on it or reblog it. Together these two things destroyed me, and the general negative atmosphere on Tumblr wasn’t helping.
The point is not that the artist or the writer is a bad person for not being open to unsolicited attention from some rando on the internet, because that was totally their prerogative, but rather that it’s important to be realistic about what rejection is going to mean to you. People love to say things like “You don’t know until you try!” and “You should just give it a shot,” but you have to be honest with yourself. If, for example, getting your piece rejected from a fanzine is going to ruin your entire year and destroy your motivation to keep creating, then maybe you really shouldn’t submit anything to begin with.
In the meantime, it’s important to find a community where the emotional stakes aren’t so high. For me, this has meant posting my work on Instagram, where I knew no one was going to care about anything related to fandom. I started posting art (mainly Ganondorf and flowers) just about every day, and it didn’t matter if it didn’t get reblogged by the popular fandom people because that sort of culture just doesn’t exist on that platform. Meanwhile, I was really lucky to find a supportive audience in my family in Israel, who don’t speak a word of English or know anything about video games but still like everything I do on Instagram because they’re just wonderful like that.
For some people, finding a nonjudgmental community might involve drafting your circle of IRL friends into Inktober whether they can draw or not. For some people it might involve going to a weekly “drink and draw” meet-up hosted by a local comic book store. For some people it might involve making xeroxed zines that they can physically hold in their hands. While support is important, it’s not something you can count on, so the key thing (for me at least) has been to find a space where rejection isn’t an issue.
A safe space is important because what I really want to do is draw A LOT, every single day. I want to experiment, I want to draw a bunch of practice sketches that don’t look so great, I want to challenge myself, I want to build stamina, and I want to complete projects, even if they’re not worth putting in a museum or posting on Tumblr or whatever. If I’ve improved at all, it’s only because I learned to ignore the haters and start doing what I wanted to do just because I wanted to do it.
Around the same time, a fanfic writer I admired was posting about how she was worried that what she created didn’t mean anything to anyone, so I drew fan art of one of her stories with a short caption saying how much I loved her work. She liked it, but she didn’t comment on it or reblog it. Together these two things destroyed me, and the general negative atmosphere on Tumblr wasn’t helping.
The point is not that the artist or the writer is a bad person for not being open to unsolicited attention from some rando on the internet, because that was totally their prerogative, but rather that it’s important to be realistic about what rejection is going to mean to you. People love to say things like “You don’t know until you try!” and “You should just give it a shot,” but you have to be honest with yourself. If, for example, getting your piece rejected from a fanzine is going to ruin your entire year and destroy your motivation to keep creating, then maybe you really shouldn’t submit anything to begin with.
In the meantime, it’s important to find a community where the emotional stakes aren’t so high. For me, this has meant posting my work on Instagram, where I knew no one was going to care about anything related to fandom. I started posting art (mainly Ganondorf and flowers) just about every day, and it didn’t matter if it didn’t get reblogged by the popular fandom people because that sort of culture just doesn’t exist on that platform. Meanwhile, I was really lucky to find a supportive audience in my family in Israel, who don’t speak a word of English or know anything about video games but still like everything I do on Instagram because they’re just wonderful like that.
For some people, finding a nonjudgmental community might involve drafting your circle of IRL friends into Inktober whether they can draw or not. For some people it might involve going to a weekly “drink and draw” meet-up hosted by a local comic book store. For some people it might involve making xeroxed zines that they can physically hold in their hands. While support is important, it’s not something you can count on, so the key thing (for me at least) has been to find a space where rejection isn’t an issue.
A safe space is important because what I really want to do is draw A LOT, every single day. I want to experiment, I want to draw a bunch of practice sketches that don’t look so great, I want to challenge myself, I want to build stamina, and I want to complete projects, even if they’re not worth putting in a museum or posting on Tumblr or whatever. If I’ve improved at all, it’s only because I learned to ignore the haters and start doing what I wanted to do just because I wanted to do it.
