Have You Been Ghosted?

There are similarities between dating and art. With art, you are being vulnerable, sharing the deepest parts of yourself and putting them out in the world and hoping that they are well received. We do the same with ourselves, we date and we put ourselves out there and let our guards down and hope for the best. And sometimes it doesn't pan out. 

You send out your new collection of work to your email list and it is tumbleweed. You submit your latest creation that took you months to make and you don’t hear back. You even send up a courteous follow up email and that is also ignored. You have been ghosted. There is no way of eliciting a response and you are none the wiser why this has been the case, you are left with no answers but lots of guesses. 

And when we share our art and it is ghosted, we second guess ourselves. We start making assumptions about why they didn’t get back to us and it gets personal. The work isn’t good enough, aka I’m not good enough. This art thing might not be something I can pursue, maybe I am not cut out for it. My art is not the right kind of art. I am not the right kind of artist. No one likes my art. 

This is something everyone that creates goes through and the only way to make it through is to show ourselves some grace and kindness. 

First things first, we are allowed to be upset that the portfolio we worked incredibly hard on for months on end, has now been submitted to 100 agencies and only 2 bothered to respond with a no thanks. Grieve that. Allow for the space to get mad and sad and anything in between. Don’t resist this or try to bypass it as though it is a sign of weakness, it is a process that you have to allow yourself to go through or else it will get stored and repressed and start seeping out in all manner of unfortunate ways. So be kind and gentle and support yourself through it all. 

Once you have grieved the sense of failure, then take a step back and get objective. Take the personal out of it and look at all the acts undertaken objectively. Was the art sent to the right agent? Was I misaligning what I am creating  with where I was submitting? Are there any areas of my portfolio that could do with a little tweaking? Is the headline in the email not really communicating what I am sharing? Are the images too large to be opened in the email and so they are going unseen? There are so many reasons why the results may not be what you wished for but they are all impersonal and all hold solutions. 

You after all are creative, so seeking out alternative solutions is an art form in itself and now you can begin to explore alternatives. Decide what you do really well and what work that you create you genuinely believe in and can advocate for. What isn’t really what you want to be working on but thought it was best to pursue because someone on Instagram said so? Now we can remove what isn’t working for us and zone in on what is. 

Realign ourselves with our work and become advocates for it. You have grieved your losses, you have looked again objectively, you have reassessed and reflected and you have repositioned yourself and where you are heading. And you are ready to go again. This process could take 20 minutes, 2 days or 3 months. It is not on a timetable, it just is and we as creatives are going to come across this time and time again. So it is not a case of avoiding any kind of failure at all cost. Quite the opposite, it is having a process of kindness and compassion in place for when it happens, because it does happen and it’s ok. 

I have had more rejections and emails/submissions ghosted than I have had successes. And the successes didn’t really teach me that much but they were wonderful and felt great. The failures taught me everything, they improved my work, they made me think more creatively, they showed me alternative ways and that most importantly, a no or a ghosting is not the end if I don’t want it to be. Where there’s a will there’s a way. And there is always a way, you might just have to look in another place, walk down another path, try another method. 

Anytime in our lives, when we are sharing a part of ourselves and being vulnerable we are inviting the option of rejection and pain. Anytime we love we know inherent in that is the pain of loss, it comes with the territory; but it doesn’t mean we opt out and do not participate. The love, the creating is where the juice and the joy is, so why would we not want to participate. All we need is to know that come what may, we will always be on our own sides. We can rely on ourselves for the support we need and we can offer the solace when it is needed without giving up.