The Strange Freedom of Not Worrying So Much About Rejection

I’ve spent a good portion of my life being afraid of rejection. Not necessarily in the obvious ways, where you avoid people or opportunities altogether, but in the quieter ways that shape your decisions before you even realize you’re making them. You convince yourself you’re not interested in something. You decide it’s not worth the effort. You tell yourself you don’t need anyone else’s approval, which might be true, but beneath that reasoning lies the uncomfortable possibility that you might actually want something, and someone else might decide you’re not good enough to have it.

When you’ve experienced trauma as I have, rejection can carry a weight that doesn’t always make sense in the present moment. Being disliked, excluded, criticized, or passed over can feel like something much bigger than the situation itself. I’ve struggled with rejection sensitivity for years, and while I’ve done plenty of work around it, knowing where a response comes from doesn’t automatically make it disappear. Sometimes you can understand your own patterns perfectly well and still find yourself participating in them.

For a long time, that showed up in my creative life as resistance to things like challenges, competitions, and juried art shows. I could make art all day long. I could share it online, sell it, teach it, and build businesses around it. But voluntarily handing something over to a panel of people who would decide whether it was worthy of inclusion? That was a different story because it’s an internal rebellion of telling yourself, you don’t need anyone’s approval!

And to be fair, I’ve never believed that winning competitions or getting accepted into juried shows is what makes someone an artist. I still don’t. Art is subjective, judges have preferences, and a rejection doesn’t necessarily tell you much about the quality of your work. There are plenty of talented artists who never enter a single competition, and their work is no less valuable because of it.

But there’s a difference between choosing not to participate because something genuinely doesn’t interest you and choosing not to participate because you’re afraid of how you’ll feel if someone says no.

I think I’ve spent a lot of time pretending those two things were the same.

And Then I Started Entering Things

Since getting into surface pattern design, I’ve found myself doing something that would have surprised an earlier version of me. I’ve been entering design challenges and contests. Not just thinking about entering them, saving the information, or telling myself I’ll try the next one. Actually making the designs, submitting them, and moving on with my day.

I’ve entered several now. I even won a spot in a studio membership with Liz Kohler Brown, which was a pretty wonderful outcome. And currently, I’m working on designs for Minted so I can submit them to their challenges.

The interesting part isn’t that I’ve started entering competitions. It’s how little internal negotiation seems to be required anymore. I see an opportunity that interests me, look at the requirements, and decide whether I want to make something for it. If I do, I get to work. When it’s finished, I submit it.

There is no lengthy conversation with myself about whether I’m ready. No elaborate consideration of how embarrassing it might be if I don’t get selected. No convincing myself that I should wait until I’ve developed a stronger portfolio or become a more established surface designer.

Apparently, I’ve become someone who just enters things, which is rather funny considering how much time I’ve spent avoiding exactly that.

The Realization Came Afterward

What caught my attention recently was realizing that I hadn’t been thinking about rejection at all while working on these submissions. It wasn’t until afterward that I noticed the absence of something that had once taken up an enormous amount of space in my head.

I had this little moment of wondering, Wait. Am I seriously not worried about getting rejected?

Sure, I care. Of course I would love to have a design selected. I’d be thrilled to win another opportunity, see my artwork recognized, or eventually have one of my designs picked up by a company like Minted. I’m not going to pretend I’m completely detached from the outcome, because I’m not. But I’m also not treating the possibility of rejection as a reason to avoid participating.

Somewhere along the way, the question changed from What if they don’t like my work? to What do I actually have to lose by trying?

And when I really think about it, the answer is not much.

I’ll have spent time making art, which is something I was going to do anyway. I’ll have worked with a creative brief, explored ideas I might not have considered on my own, and probably learned something about my process. I’ll have another design for my portfolio or something I can potentially develop into another product.

If it gets selected, wonderful. If it doesn’t, the work still exists. I still made it. I can do something else with it. The submission is one possible destination for the artwork, not the entire reason it deserves to exist.

I Don’t Think This Happened Overnight

I wish I could point to a defining moment when I decided rejection would no longer bother me, but I can’t. There wasn’t a dramatic breakthrough or a grand declaration that I was finally done caring what other people thought.

I suspect this has been happening gradually, through years of making things, putting myself in uncomfortable situations, building businesses, having ideas that worked, and having plenty that didn’t. I’ve had enough experience now to know that disappointment is survivable, even when it doesn’t feel particularly pleasant.

Surface pattern design may also have given me a different way to approach the whole thing. I’m still learning this industry. I’m experimenting with styles, collections, colorways, and applications. There’s something freeing about being a beginner again, especially when I don’t expect myself to have everything figured out.

With pyrography, I’ve spent decades developing my skills. There’s a history there, along with expectations I’ve built around what I should be able to do. Surface design is newer territory, and perhaps that makes it easier to approach opportunities with curiosity rather than feeling like every outcome says something about my abilities.

Here’s the thing: I haven’t suddenly stopped being someone who experiences rejection sensitivity. I haven’t become immune to criticism, and I doubt I’ll ever reach a point where being dismissed or excluded feels completely insignificant. But I seem to be getting better at not allowing the anticipation of those feelings to make my decisions for me.

Making Something Is No Longer the Same as Proving Something

I think this might be the part that matters most to me. For much of my life, being accepted has felt tangled up with being good enough. Not just in art, but in relationships, work, and all the other places where people form opinions about us. When you’ve spent years feeling like you have to earn your place, it’s easy to carry that same thinking into creative opportunities.

A juried show or design competition can become more than a chance to share your work. It can start to feel like a verdict on whether you belong. And that’s a ridiculous amount of authority to give a group of people who are simply choosing artwork for a particular purpose.

They might be looking for a specific aesthetic, a certain color palette, or something that fits a commercial collection. They might genuinely love a design and still not select it. They might choose something I wouldn’t have chosen myself.

None of those possibilities requires me to reconsider whether I should be making art. There is a distinction between having my work evaluated and having my worth evaluated. Those are not the same thing, even if my nervous system has occasionally had trouble telling them apart.

I can want an opportunity without needing it to confirm something about me. I can be disappointed without turning that disappointment into a story about why I shouldn’t have tried. And I can enjoy the process of creating something for a challenge without spending the entire time imagining what the judges might think.

There’s a surprising amount of room to make things when you’re not busy trying to protect yourself from every possible outcome.

So I’ll Keep Entering

I have no idea what will happen with the Minted challenges. Maybe one of my designs will be selected. Maybe none of them will. I’ll probably be excited if something comes of it and a little disappointed if it doesn’t.

There will be more challenges, more opportunities, and probably plenty of submissions that go absolutely nowhere. I’m okay with that. Or at least, I’m increasingly okay with that, which feels like a more accurate description of where I am.

What fascinates me is that this change happened without my making it a specific goal. I didn’t set out to become someone who enters art competitions. I just started finding opportunities that sounded interesting and giving them a try. Only now am I recognizing how different that is from the way I used to approach things.

Maybe that’s one of the stranger parts of personal growth. Sometimes you’re so busy living your life that you don’t notice an old fear has become a little quieter. It doesn’t announce its departure. You just find yourself doing something you once avoided, and afterward you wonder when it stopped feeling so difficult.

I don’t need to win every challenge I enter. I don’t even need to win most of them, but I am enjoying being the person who sees an opportunity, thinks Why not?, and gives it a go.

For someone who once found the possibility of rejection reason enough not to try, that’s quite a change.

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