Ginger Hendrix, Writer

How Public Rejection Sucks

A couple of months back, I put up a free class on Skillshare, a sort of beginner's guide to getting started at the sewing machine. And, you know, I did it the Ginger way. Pulled in good gob of goofiness so that I could have fun doing it. 

Then yesterday, I got my first real, nasty kind of public comment about it. And, of course, there is the thing of how we always focus on the bad reviews and not the good ones, but there's got to be more than just that too. Something about the hiding that wants to come when the bad news voices come at us. 

I've written thousands and thousands of words about this failure loop, but it never stops intriguing me. So I thought I would just go ahead and list publicly here my best rejection to date--think of this as a christmas gift to you and to me (something almost as tasty as watching ice skaters fall in competition):

Drumroll...

The former university student who wrote: "she is a dry humored left wing cocky bitch..."

And I have to say that after years of receiving public blips of out-in-the-world rejection, this one is still my absolute favorite. It's the one I prefer to quote when anybody else starts to talk about their own rejection and somehow it accidentally turns into a competition.

Score!

And why is this a Christmas post because there is not a single red and green picture included here, and also rejection doesn't seemed related to baby Jesus in the manger or blackFriday or Christmas morning breakfast casseroles in any way that we can muster the connection?

Because we offer our real stuff up to the world in moments of our souls' Christmastimes, those pull-out-from-the-routine moments when we say that other stuff doesn't matter, and that we know we're just supposed to pop a love note in the mail, or spend more money on a gift than we really should, or eat plates and plates of cheese potatoes followed by cookies with sprinkles around a folding table at our holiday office lunch without a single thought of how we will want to go to sleep by 2 and also not be able to fit into our pants tomorrow.

And this courage for jumping to spring up and dive in is a precious thing, a sort of fragile thing that we can't let the world keep us from.

So I raise a glass to you at this holiday time, as you're making your humble crafty gifts happily at night, and then wondering if they're good enough to send in the morning. And I say: stay at it. Glue and glue your heart away.  Sew and crochet and paint into the night. Rubber stamp out all of your real feelings for the people you love. 

And keep in mind always, that not a single one of your friends or relatives will call you something as mean as "dry-humored" for sending what you made.

My Dog Keeps Peeing on My Failures

He has other roles in my life, of course (inside-the-nose-licker, for instance). But lately I am making quick note of the way that he is peeing on the projects that didn't go quite right. 

Thanks for the affirmation, Wally. Thanks for the deep soul nod, via your dog pee pee, that what I was shooting for didn't sync with what the project wanted to be, that I pushed something beyond where it wanted to go. Thanks for affirming my own soul's sense that I can push and push old fabric around all I want, but at the end of the day the fabric tells me what it wants to be. 

I've needed you, man. Been alone in this garage for so long, wrestling with ideas and materials, with nobody to confirm my inklings.

Good call, buddy. Good call.

 

The rug I have made and unmade at least three times now. From a bucket of t-shirts, put together with a fat crochet hook, and--apparently--not a light enough touch on the fly-by-the-seat crochet methods I'm committed to use. The only word to describe this rug: Warbled.

And yes, he's part Wienerdog. 'Bout time.