Dancin' with myself: the cruel cut of rejection

One autumn evening in 1995, we sat together on the therapist’s couch, the sun setting on another dreamy San Diego day. That’s when my soon-to-be ex-wife said the words no imperfect man ever wants to hear:

“I want a divorce.”

It’s strange, looking back, because I was hopeful that we could salvage a sliver of the joy we’d felt walking down the aisle in that little hillside church on the Baja, Mexico coast, our friends sprinkling handfuls of rice atop the halo of our happiness. 

But she had other ideas. She’d hurried to the therapist’s office from her job as an elementary school teacher. As I droned on about my supposed breakthroughs, she stopped me, with tears in her eyes. 

She’d no doubt been preparing for this. She spilled her aching emotions, looking directly at the therapist, who then set her eyes upon me. 

And that was that. Instead of repairing what was broken, our goal was now to clean up the marital wreckage and go our separate ways.

The crux of our discontent had been easy to see yet all-but-impossible to solve.

She wanted children. I did not.

Still, the words hurt, like a grenade tossed into a soldier’s bunker.

Not just of failure, but rejection.

This personal dismissal makes you wince, like you’ve just looked directly into the sun. You’re told you’re not good-looking enough, not smart enough, not deep enough, not fun enough, not talented enough, that all you have to offer just isn’t good enough.

I’ve faced this reckoning of rejection many times. My first girlfriend broke my heart. Too many would-be bosses wounded my pride. Worse yet, was the harsh rebuff from people I thought were friends.

And here’s the thing: You’d think that, as you get older and your skin thickens and your self-realization evolves, that it somehow gets easier.

But it doesn’t. Not always.

*

I tasted my first bitter pill of rejection when I was 15, rangy, un-muscled and stoop-shouldered. I had a paper route and had just discovered that I liked girls. Yet as I popped those facial pimples in the bathroom mirror, I also felt the first pangs of disappointment over who I was. 

If this is what I brought to the table, who would be attracted to me?

One afternoon, as a friend and I unbundled the papers to deliver on that afternoon’s route, two girls our age stopped to apprise us, giggling and whispering.

They wore bell-bottoms with big buckles and frilly blouses as girls did in those days. One was a slender girl named Cathy Capraro. I’d noticed her at school. 

The girls loomed until my friend Wayne and I looked up from our work.

“Cathy likes you,” the other girl said.

“Likes who?” Wayne replied, as though he was just curious enough to care.

The girl paused and pointed at me.

The lightning bolt hit. I’d never felt its electricity before. It was surging and warm and good. And I liked it. I smiled.

Then, as quickly as it was lit, the fire smoldered and died.

Cathy franticly whispered in her friend’s ear. The girl withdrew her hand like she’d felt a bee sting. Then she pointed at Wayne.

“Well, so what?” he said. “Who cares?”

I did. I liked the feeling of that finger pointing at me.

*

Ah, rejection: I got used to it. 

When I was in high school I went to this bar on the west side of town where the deejay played Bachman-Turner Overdrive and Grand Funk Railroad and the Bee Gees and the Eagles and the Average White Band.

The place had a thick blue shag carpet that reeked of spilled beer and cigarettes. You knew terrible things grew in that carpet, so if you dropped anything less than a quarter, you didn’t bother to pick it up.

They were days before Punk and New Wave and it was definitely not OK to be like Billy Idol “dancing with myself.” If you wanted to dance, a strange girl first had to say yes.

One night I actually went something like zero for 25. Do you know how it feels to like a song and want to dance so badly that your body literally jumps out of your clothes? I didn’t care about the girl, necessarily, I just wanted to dance. 

But I couldn’t. I had to stand there and pretend I didn’t care. 

Once I leaned into the left ear of a pretty girl sitting at a table to ask her to dance. She sized me up in a nanosecond, the way women sometimes do, and shook her head.

Just at that moment, another guy leaned into her right ear. She nodded, and they hurried off together, hand in hand, toward the dance floor.

I wasn’t always so unlucky, of course, but you most remember the sting of the slights, the ones that harden your skin and make you determined. I’d tell people that I had angular good looks, and that my best angle was from behind.

As you get older, you learn to dance by yourself.

*

What I know about rejection is this: steer clear of situations in which you complicity give people the power to judge you.

Thank God my job interview days are behind me. After all, as they say, it's just business. And I’d just as soon dip my big toe in a fish tank full of piranhas as I would rejoin the dating scene.

But sometimes rejection stalks you. My older sister is outspoken and colorful and lives a rustic life outside of the continental U.S.

One day, she cut the cord with her six siblings. Growing up in the same household apparently did not assure the privilege of having a relationship as adults. She 86’d us on social media, changed her phone number.

She has her motives, of course, but still her rejection came out of the blue.

The others feel pain in her betrayal, but not me.

Maybe it’s something I learned as a boy delivering papers or in those countless nightclubs where my body ached to move.

Other than my divorce, this rejection is perhaps the most personal of all.

But I don’t blame my sister. I wish her well.

I’m Ok, she’s OK.

Now let’s dance.