Thoughts on searching for a job in honor of my one year anniversary.

It gets easier to be rejected (most days).

You take a deep breath, you make the call.

You smile because they say you can hear a smile on the other end of the phone.  Now this is a game. How many seconds can pass before they finally say no?

Before you call, it is placed firmly in their mind. Before they answer the phone, they think it. They take a deep breath before they answer. They don’t want to make this difficult. They don’t want to think of it in terms of “rejection”. But you make them.

You smile so big, your arms do not have room to hold their rejection. You offer your armful of happiness to them. Suddenly, they realize that their two letters are heavier than they first thought. So they try to add a few more to disperse the weight, for your sake, of course. “We really liked you but…” And you hear about how qualified someone else is, about how little work they have, about the experience that you don’t quite have, about every good intention that they just found.

This is the point at which, if you are truly playing the game, you smile bigger, deeper, broader.

You say you understand. Smile again.

You smother any sort of insincerity right out of them with your magnanimity. You thank them generously and exit quickly to leave them believing, if possible, that they really did want to hire you.

Then you let out the breath that you took before you made the call, just as surely as they are also letting their breath loose. You let all of the hope and smile fall through your fingers and throw their rejection on the heap with the others in the corner of your mind. How long before they say “no”? And each time, you hope, you learn to hold your breath a little longer. Until one day, you learn to hold it longer than them.