Rejection doesn't happen in an emotional vacuum.

On shredding the clinical negligence letters alongside the lit mag rejection slips.

Photo by Martin Baron on Unsplash

Summer at Notes from the Margin

My memoir, The Ghost Lake

My poetry collection, Blackbird Singing at Dusk

This is a post about allowing yourself to feel the bruise of rejection, as a writer, but it also contains some notes about what it is like to lose a baby to clinical negligence, so be gentle with yourself, if you think that might be triggering.

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For the last couple of weeks, as I declutter my house, I have been shredding bags of documents that have been waiting to be tackled for years.

Overwhelm is a weird thing.

I look at these bags and bags of old receipts and bank statements and stuff and wonder why I didn't do anything with them when I was receiving them years ago. But I can see, by the types of documents that are there, crammed together with no rhyme or reason, that I was having a really shitty time and had decided as an act of self care to shove everything into bags and then shove those bags into the box room and shut the door.

Fast forward to 2025 and here I am, living a life with stresses I can finally cope with, working in a way that feels absolutely 100% myself, 100% right for me as an artist and as a weird-brain person, enjoying my life, which I genuinely thought I’d never do again, and wanting to actually use the box room rather than feeling a crushing sense of shame every time I walk past it, due to the fact that I can barely get the door open for all the stuff that’s in it.

What Documents are in the Bags of Overwhelm?

• Receipts from the IVF clinic

• Debt letters

• Letters from the solicitor in charge of the investigation into our daughter’s death

• Fluctuating bank statements

• Information about my first business

• Rejection slips from literary magazines

It’s a well of sad in those bags and I’m finding it extremely cathartic to shred the stuff. My little shredder gets overheated after ten pages so it is a long job, but it feels right that it should take time to delete a big chunk of my life like this.

Yesterday I shredded a letter from 2012 that told me something about the care we received when my daughter died in 2010, a letter that confirmed that clinical negligence had a part in her death. I still felt like I needed to hold on to it, as if I would need at some point to go back into battle again and fight to have policies changed, to have better checks put in place around maternity care at the hospital. I kept putting it to one side and not shredding it, as if that piece of paper, that proof of what happened might be needed as a shield. How exhausting is this grief - a kind of alertness that you can never quite put down. I dealt with the letter by picking it up and putting it down repeatedly, feeling for a weight in my heart when I did so. What purpose was it serving me? Had I actually escaped from that place, or was I chained to that experience by these physical items, these documents? I decided that that part of my life was past. I shredded it. I let it go. I have released myself from the weight of that single piece of paper.

Anyone can see from that list that it is a lot for one person to be dealing with. It is like looking at a diary entry in which my whole life is about surviving. The documents span the years in which I was grieving the death of my baby, suspecting that something had gone wrong in our care, but getting no where with the hospital, bringing in professional help to investigate, leaving my job (at that same hospital) because PTSD was making it impossible to work there, starting a new business, taking the hit of less wages because the business (small animal care and dog walking) was in its infancy, going through the pain-mill of more IVF and behold what I was also doing to my fragile mental state - sending poems and short stories to literary magazines and receiving rejections. I was probably beating myself up for being upset when they bounced back, believing that I should get a tougher skin if I wanted to be a writer.

I have a point here, about the bags of doom, and it’s this: rejections don’t happen in an emotional vacuum. They don’t always happen when your life is about surviving and not killing yourself from the sad, but they do usually happen when you are dealing with small and big griefs, work exhaustion, world events exhaustion, secret sads that you don’t tell anyone. All of this adds weight to the rejection.

There’s a real push towards accepting rejection as part of the life of being a writer, and it absolutely is a part of the whole journey, but you have every right to feel bruised about it. It’s another small sad to add to your pile and that stuff is overwhelming.

Delete it, shred it, bag it up until you re strong enough to deal with it, but don’t give up on yourself.

If you want to read my memoir, about finding myself again through history and landscape and nature, after all the BIG SADS, the link is at the top of this post.

Until next time

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