Rejection is Redirection

“Everyone’s got a plan until they get punched in the face.”

This is my second punch of the year.

Unlike the last time, I can’t neatly distill this into a clean lesson. Not because I played my cards wrong — I think I played them well. Sometimes you make all the right moves and still don’t get the outcome you deserve. That’s poker. That’s life.

What’s harder to sit with is the ambiguity. Was it me? Was it circumstance? I don’t have a clear answer, and maybe I won’t for a while. To be humble comes at the cost of being assertive — and I’m still figuring out where that line sits.

So instead of forcing a lesson, I’m giving myself permission to just… process.

There’s a song that kept running through my mind. Funny enough, my wife told me that today my son asked Siri to play that exact same song — and sang along to it. A beautiful coincidence.

https://youtu.be/6NXnxTNIWkc?si=lrvjgIly8z7XaVzU

I’ll take my time. I’ll rise stronger. And at the very least — I now know exactly how it feels to really want to prove someone wrong.