The Protagonist Bias and Creative Rejection
The truth is, almost nothing is personal.
Dealing with rejection is part of being creative. If you’re putting your work out there in the world, inevitably you’ll experience rejection of some kind. Our protagonist bias can make dealing with it more difficult. This is a bias that emerges from seeing ourselves as the protagonist of our own life story. It can make us take things personally when the truth is, almost nothing is personal.
Humans are meaning-makers. That’s what we do all day long. We interpret what we see and experience by creating a story from it. The story is how we understand the sequence of events, and anchors us in linear time. It’s causal by nature: something happens that has effects, which then have more effects. Even if we’re not consciously aware of the story we’re creating, our brain is constantly doing this for us in the background.
Understanding our lives through stories has its benefits, but there is one major drawback. It positions us as protagonist, and gives rise to an illusion that everything that happens to us is somehow about us. This is reinforced by the stories we see and read for entertainment. The basic plot of a novel or TV show centers on the experiences of a protagonist, and all events are connected to them either in that the protagonist makes them happen or is impacted by them.
As the star of our own story, we suffer from the bias that what we experience is personal. When we hear people laughing in our vicinity, many of us have a knee-jerk reaction that they’re somehow laughing at us, even when we know it’s extremely unlikely. We’re interpreting everything from our own perspective, and it’s a natural and adaptive trait to assess things in terms of what they have to do with us. But it also leads to many faulty assumptions.
The truth is that almost nothing outside of ourselves has to do with us. That is to say, our own reactions belong to us, but the outer circumstances that elicit them do not. Knowing this can help immensely when it comes to dealing with how people receive our creative work. We may feel that people’s reactions to our work have to do with us, but they don’t. Not at all. Two different people can see entirely different things in our work. Their reactions are 100% to do with them and their own internal mindscapes.
Not taking people’s reactions personally is difficult, though, even when we know they aren’t. That’s because we identify with our own work. We see it as an extension of ourselves. This is where we need to detach. We need to make a hard break between our work as it belongs to us during creation, and our work out in the world where it belongs to consumers. Once we put it out there, it’s not ours any longer. It has a life of its own. Many writers I know don’t read reviews, either negative or positive, to help them make this break. What people think about their books doesn’t have anything to do with them.
The one sticky area is when you have work out specifically for critique, which is often part of the creative process whether it occurs within the confines of a critique group or when you have your work on submission. I’m not going to lie, critical feedback can suck, because you can’t make that hard break. You have to listen to and parse feedback in these cases. But the same rule applies: any feedback is ultimately 100% about the person giving it. It’s not the truth, it’s just an opinion. But it can be very difficult to deal with critical feedback and I advise choosing critique partners and other feedback opportunties with extreme care. Remember: ultimately your creative process is yours. You get to decide what it looks like and what kind of feedback you let into your life.
Don’t feel bad about being cautious about or even rejecting feedback. Protecting yourself is necessary, particularly if you are an HSP and very sensitive to feedback, critical or otherwise. Your creative practice is sacrosanct, and anything that interferes with the joy you feel in creative process needs strong boundaries around it. Don’t let anyone tell you that you have to get feedback, or that you have to listen to it. You don’t. Feedback does not necessarily make work better. Listening to the wrong kind of feedback can make your work worse. Pay attention to your feelings in these matters. Feedback only helps if you are open to it, and it’s the right kind. Trust yourself. What matters is how you feel about your work, not what other people think about it.