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The Importance of “No”
Why rejection is better than nothing
When was the last time someone actually told you “no”? If you search your mind or read back through your correspondence, I think you’ll find that this useful two-letter word began fading away sometime in the early aughts.
Today, nothing is the new no.
Perhaps you clicked with someone you met online and proposed a second date. Nothing. Maybe you wrote a passionate essay and sent it to a magazine you admire. Ghosted.
The ever so slight possibility of a “yes” prevents us from seeing the fact that the answer is “no”
And yet, this wasn’t always the case. During my adolescence and early adulthood, clear and stinging rejection, not nothing, was a very big something. So big, in fact, that the very architecture of our psychology once depended upon our ability to process outright denial. What is The Blues other than a deep consideration of repudiation followed by an acceptance? “Call, Response, Release,” the Langston Hughes scholar George Bass used to boom out to us in the lecture hall when he would hold forth on what makes the Blues work.
By losing “no” we’ve lost an essential gear for working through rejection. Instead of “Call, Response, Release” we have…
