Rejection is Protection

My Facebook friend Diane Lisk had a great status update yesterday: “Rejection is God protecting you.” I shared this idea with my friend Andrea Regalado by phone, and she said this was a common refrain with her friend Tamara (of Tia and Tamara fame), who puts it this way: Rejection is God’s protection.

I’d never heard this saying, but I’ve certainly come to know its truth in my own life. Time and time again I have faced a rejection that, at the time, felt devastating but later proved to be the best thing that could have happened to me.

A recent example is when my first novel was optioned by a production company that I trusted, only to have them use my name and book title to create a miserably bad TV pilot riddled with insulting stereotypes that not only had nothing to do with my original work but were antithetical to it. When I complained publicly about what had been done to my work, I was slammed by the producer with a brutal defamation threat at the hands of the highest-powered attorney in Hollywood.

Naturally, I was heartbroken and afraid. Not only was my life’s work being destroyed by someone I had trusted and signed the rights over to, but now I was being harassed by the same ruthless attorney used by top celebrities to go after papparazzi. I cried myself to sleep many nights.

Then I “cowboyed up” and hired my own lawyer, Harris Tulchin, one of the best entertainment attorneys in Los Angeles, to defend me.

Harris is a brilliant man with a good heart and he did an amazing job. It turned out, unbeknownst to me, that Harris himself was a film producer and had written the quintessential book on producing independent films. We became friends. He admired my chutzpah and, best of all, became a fan of my work. Harris partnered with me to produce another of my novels. And now that the rights to that first novel have come back to me, he is working as my manager to make sure I am partnered with exactly the right people this time around — with incredible results.

I recently realized that I had to go through that nightmare with the first producer in order to meet Harris, the man who would change my life and kick my career to a whole new level.

On my drive down to the ranch this week I was listening to Book Radio on SiriusXM and happened across an interview with actress Linda Evans about her new memoir, and she basically said the same thing; all the bad things that had happened to her in her life had turned out to be blessings in disguise.

It’s hard to remember this, especially in the throes of a painful rebuff or failure. But we must keep the faith. We must force ourselves to surrender to a wiser will than our own. We must remember that we cannot know the future. We cannot assume that what we WANT is what we actually NEED.

We must trust that there is a reason for rejection and failure, and that the reason is our own well-being.