Rationalizing Rejection

Some disheartening events.  One major betrayal, I think, or at best insensitivity by people who I expected to serve as my advocates.  My best work submitted and turned down.  What I thought was going to be outreach to my mind ended up being a pitch for a large bequest.  My own synagogue registers as less welcoming than six months ago.  No real damage from any of this.  In fact, some may have acted in my interest in an unappreciated way, helping me dodge a very big bullet in my later years, though in a manner that would have greatly impeded me professionally at mid-career.  With these, and more, I understand my role is to serve as a tool for the organizations that had not treated me the way I had anticipated.  I get it.  No inclination on my part to seek reprisal other than eliminating some places from the bequest section of my will.

In my younger, working years, I might have been more miffed by these events.  Now, in my senior years, financially secure, in reasonable health, with a stable supportive family, I am not dependent on the things I do being well-received, or even being treated the way I hoped I might have done better were somebody seeking my acceptance.  What is more difficult, though, is finding replacement acceptance.  Unlike a former POTUS who declares anyone who challenges him to be defective, I already know that the organizations these disappointing encounters represent are not inferior.  They just did not represent my aspirations well, nor apparently did those initiatives on my part mesh with theirs.  

I value my independence.  I could use these recent rebuffs as justification to turn inward, to never do anything bold to avoid rejection.  Even at an advanced age with ample personal resources, isolation as a surrogate for protection, does not appear an attractive path.  

A more difficult branch point would be one posed by Dear Therapist of The Atlantic.  Those submitting her summaries of their problems ask her how to get thems who done them wrong to change.  Her advice invariably follow a genre that you have to change.  The other option, that she rarely takes, would be to find different people accepting of who you already are.  I think that's a better way for me to proceed.