Is Rejection Redirection?

I always hated that phrase. It felt like something people tell themselves when they can't admit they fell short. The kind of thing that sounds like wisdom but functions as an excuse — a soft landing for people who didn't make it, dressed up as perspective.

Then I didn't get into Cambridge.

Rejection is ordinary, in the sense that it happens to everyone constantly. Someone turns down a date, an application comes back negative, a university sends two sentences where you hoped for something different. Most of the time people absorb it and move on.

The harder cases are the ones where you had built something around the outcome. Not just wanted it, but constructed a version of the future around it. When that version doesn't arrive, the rejection doesn't just close a door. It leaves you standing in a hallway you didn't know you were in.

That's the kind of rejection worth being honest about.

After my acceptance, I found myself at a welcome dinner for new students at Seoul National University. A professor came to our table and asked each of us, one by one, why we'd chosen the department. Most gave polished answers. One student said, flatly, that his grades just fit. The professor looked more satisfied with that answer than any of the others.

His point was this: students who arrive with elaborate expectations almost always end up disappointed. Not because the department fails them, but because the expectation was never real. It was a picture they had painted before they knew enough to paint one. And when reality arrives, it rarely matches the picture.

He compared it to catching a glimpse of someone across a café and deciding, from a distance, that they probably have a beautiful voice. You talk to them, and the voice is nothing like you imagined. Whose fault is that?

He said we use the phrase "more than I expected" constantly, in every direction. That gap between the picture and the thing follows us everywhere, into universities and careers and relationships. And almost always, the gap isn't the fault of the thing.

I sat with that for a while. Because when I thought about my rejection, what stung wasn't just the outcome. It was that collision between what I had built in my head and what I received. The picture was detailed. The response was brief.

Here is what I've come to think, and it isn't the tidy version.

University admissions, and interviews especially, carry a significant amount of luck. The question they happen to ask. The dynamic in the room on that particular day. Whether the concept they land on is one you encountered last week or three years ago. You can prepare well and still not get in. You can be underprepared and still get through. Pretending otherwise is its own kind of dishonesty.

So no, I don't think rejection is always information about what you did wrong. Sometimes it is. Often it's a mixture. And sometimes it just isn't your day, and there isn't a clean lesson to extract.

What I do think is this: the students who handle rejection well are not the ones who find the neatest explanation for it. They're the ones who don't let it become the whole story.

There is a limit to how much of yourself you can pour into a single outcome. If you spend it all running toward a name, a place, a symbol of what you think you want, and it doesn't arrive, the question is simply what you do next. Not why it happened, not what it means about you. Just: what now.

That's not redirection. It isn't a lesson the universe is trying to teach you. It's just the next decision, and it belongs entirely to you.

I still don't love the phrase. Rejection is redirection implies the universe is steering you somewhere better, which is a comforting idea but not one I find honest. What I'd say instead is simpler: some things don't work out, for reasons that are partly yours and partly not. The only part you control is what you do afterward.

Maybe that's all the phrase ever meant. It just took longer to see it that way.