I forgot I followed you on Medium, remembered today, clicked through your stuff, and was very glad I did.

I like this a lot, but with the utmost respect and kindness, I feel like this article is getting to the point, but not quite at it. The point is, your negative feelings are also a part of the compass guiding your action, just like positive feelings. You can’t have True North without True South. It’s easy to learn what makes us feel good and move towards those things. But what about what makes us feel bad? What can the pain of rejection, or any other pain, teach you about yourself as opposed to some imagined idea of what it can teach you about the rejector?

What you’re talking about here is antifragility. To release one’s painful feelings like bitterness, resentment, anger, is robust. If rejection can’t harm us, then we limit our ability to be harmed. But working with rejection and the feelings it produces as a tool to drive us deeper into our own truth/discovery/bliss/whatever it is we’re actually looking for. It’s what makes rejection able to catalyze us towards growth by allowing it to harm us first. I think it was Alan Watts who called it “tacking with the wind” — using the negative feelings we have as a tool to point us in the most harmonious direction.

Love the hard liberty quote. I’d been looking for a quote to sum that feeling up and this would make a good tattoo ;)