I don’t know about you, but I have an allergic reaction to rejection. It’s not that my face swells up or I break out in hives. No, my allergy can only be described as intensely emotional. The first thing that happens, when I get rejected, is that my mind sort of goes blank for a while, as though it hasn’t quite registered the rejection yet. Amazingly, I have been known to stay in relationships three years past the point of that original rejection date, all because of that initial, allergy-induced inability to see and process reality clearly. But when my brain does catch up to the fact of the rejection, the second thing that happens is that I become very, very angry. Like hot, leaping flames that are spreading uncontrollably, my anger will rage and burn, and do far more damage, than just the spot where the rejection originated. Like, I won’t just block the phone number of the person who rejected me; I’ll go so far as to block the numbers of everyone in my phone who merely shares their gender. Things like that — total overkill! As you might expect, feeding the flames of rejection with reasoning such as, if they hurt me, I’ll hurt everyone else twice as hard! actually does very little to soothe my own rejection burns. No, no, the best and most effective way to treat an allergy to rejection is to forget about who burned me entirely, and to focus my loving attention on myself, instead. Because the antidote to any sort of rejection is actually compassion. I could find that compassion from a friend, sure. But at the end of the day, rejection demands that I slather a whole bunch of it on myself. Think of it as buttering up a steaming hot dinner roll. ❤️‍🔥—Y.B.D.