The acceptance/rejection phenomenon has existed as a background file in my little academic psyche for as long as I’ve had a psyche– upsides and downsides to being cognizant and immersed in the driven Asian community. But I fairly much coasted through everything– successful audition for advanced choir in sixth grade, successful win in literary category just for fun after the move to another state, successful blah blah blah summer program after 10th grade– until the summer after junior year.

Rejection letters were a fact of life that I wasn’t used to. Naive, the sense of academic entitlement, but frankly, up until that point, I hadn’t ever been below the highest par required. And here was some University’s summer program telling me that I was.

Which I wasn’t, but procrastination and that sense of never-mind-my-sloppy-application-I’ll-probably-get-it-anyway really clocked me upside the head, and duly so. I wouldn’t have been able to survive past a certain point hadn’t I realized that, yes, the world is full of people more talented than you, no, you shall not magically get everything you apply to, no, nothing is going to spontaneously resolve itself regardless of your effort.

The problem is, up until then, things had. And that was a hard misconception to let go of because it was so easy. So comfortable. So conducive to letting me lay back and cross my fingers.

So now I’ve prided myself on bracing myself appropriately for rejection and being realistic. It’s not going to get easier from here; the older you grow, the larger the radius of the competition circle. Suck it up. College acceptance was therefore a surprise of euphoria induced like never before. This does not, however, mean that I’ve learned to shake rejection off particularly more easily.

And now I haven’t even made the first-cut interviewee pool for my first choice internship, the members of which include a casual friend of mine who, dear girl that she is and such, doesn’t even have any ambitions for a legal career or law school.

Ouch.

Time to kick back into high gear. Again. And possibly still have it not be enough.

But that’s what happens nowadays. Radius growing? Exponentially.