"Sometimes I feel like my whole life has been a rejection", this quote from Marilyn Monroe makes me cringe a little bit. Like the type of cringe where you might also just barf. When we read this type of nonsense actually written out on paper, it becomes quite clear how "special snowflake", narcissistic and histrionic we can be. I am not saying I haven't felt that way at times, no I am not above that. I can suffocate a bit on my own feelings. Nevertheless, these self-indulgent things we say to ourselves does not serve anyone - they are just a complete load of bullshit. It is our responsibility to stop feeding that shit, so we stop allowing ourselves to become victims in our own life and die from an overdose or whatever self-destructive pattern we have going on. It is pathetic that we allow ourselves to sink - and think - this low, it really is. And we should be angry about it. Change is not going to happen from a place of waddling around in our own sorry feelings for ourselves - to get some action going, we need to get a bit angry. Angry about what we have allowed to happen and get stuck in.

In the movie Pay It Forward there is a scene where Helen Hunt says to Kevin Spacey, "I can't reject you, you're too quick for me".

Kevin Spacey has some emotional stuff from his past that causes him to have intimacy issues with getting close to anyone incl. Helen.

I thought this was a poignant reminder of how we tend to unconsciously exhibit the very behavior towards ourselves - and quite often also towards others - that we fear the most.

We reject ourselves just so no one else can do it for us.

How effing crazy is that?! We tend to overvalue others while undervaluing ourselves. So instead of creating the life we want, applying for the job we want and having the people in our life of our choosing, we reject these things, before they can even reject us.

When we view rejection as the end-all, we become stagnant and inflexible.

We seize the opportunity to grow our character. The way to break this cycle is to decide to take rejection less personally. We do this by consciously reframing what "rejection" means to us and about us - we want to avoid it affecting our worth. So we decide to be a bit more objective about it and instead view any rejection we "feel" that we encounter as areas of growth. Keeping in mind that many times we might not actually be rejected, but it is our own insecurities causing us to interpret events this way, unfortunately. Even those times when rejection seems like a personal rejection, we choose to reframe it as a matter of "compatibility" and not about us being "not-good-enough", "not xyz enough".

Often when we reject others, it is less about them, and more about us.

We might feel insecure and so we withdraw. And this goes the other way too - we need to remember this to avoid taking rejection personally. We might also have certain vulnerabilities that we know are not compatible with certain traits and would clash in the long run. This does not devalue us - it just a matter of compatibility. Very few of us are compatible long-term, so we should not feel offended or rejected by that. Still, many of us tend to struggle with wanting that validation of being liked by another in spite of us not being into them. But we like to be liked as if we are running some popularity contest. It is absurd and also slightly insulting to those we attempt to get to like us by being this fake-nice persona.

As with anything else we fear in life, the only way to give it less power over us, is to expose ourselves to it.

This means that we have to consciously put ourselves in more situations, where we can get rejected. Anyone struggling with perfectionism will hate this. Perfectionists tend to remove themselves from the game of life to avoid falling short. Yes as perfectionists we may over-perform to make up for our lack of self-worth, but only because we despise any scent of "failure", as it taps right into our negative self-talk that "we are not enough". This is superduper bad. This results in that we usually avoid risks as the plague - and this keeps us stuck in status quo. While we may be the master of a few select areas of life, we are not willing to engage in any matters, where we cannot control the outcome. Financial investments may be right up our alley but emotional investments not so much. Until we realize that our obsession with striving for this pedestal and in turn avoiding rejection is stunting us, we will continue to be emotional retards.

For change to occur, we need to realize how our own thoughts and following actions are creating the very outcome that we fear.

That by living in this illusion of reality where we avoid the possibility of others rejecting us, we escape reality and actually create our own living nightmare paradoxically - because we are first to reject ourselves over and over again. No reality can ever hurt as much as the one we have created. Until we realize that, we won't change.