a rejection and a question

some of the developments i had been waiting on are finally coming to fruition. i’ve received my apostille’d birth certificate from florida, while maryland just shipped my marriage and divorce certificates today (though i still need to find a way to get those apostille’d, thus kicking off the next tedious leg of the process). i’ll have my next - and likely last! - interview with the company tomorrow evening, and i also finally heard back from the lit mag i had submitted to - a thoughtful rejection e-mail with constructive feedback, although i have only skimmed through it briefly.

i had expected to be more disappointed by the rejection. but when my eyes careened over the part which read “…i hope you’ll consider submitting again…” (with the assumption, of course, that i would work in their comments first), my tummy contracted at the thought of facing that wall of text yet again. that was the story, dissected neatly into three parts, of how my marriage dissolved unto itself without warning, of my stumbling journey into a psych ward as i awaited the divorce, and of the tender, desperate moments alone with my mom on the backside of that hospitalization. i had shrouded the story in enough mixed-up details to make it technically more fiction than memoir, but the core of it was personal enough that writing it felt more like an act of exorcism than creation. a pile of molted skin left behind in the grass, which i don’t necessarily have a desire to remold into a different form.

then earlier today, as i was reviewing my notes in preparation for tomorrow’s interview, i felt a sudden sense of dread similar to the one i experienced when skimming the rejection e-mail, a bubbly emulsion of angst and disgust and fear in my gullet. some people say that fear dissolves into excitement when you allow yourself to feel it fully; right now it is presenting itself as a reverberating question -

are you sure this is what you want? are you sure? are you sure??

in which the returning echo answers something like:

i dunno. dunno. no idea.

i find it simultaneously disconcerting and kind of funny that, when it comes to both my writing and the consulting gig - the two things i had counted on to keep me occupied for the near future - i don’t know how to respond to “do i want this?” except to fear the question. and for now, in this very moment, i suppose that’s okay.