A person can have a rotting liver, an organ too full of poison to function any longer, a key mechanism failing, yet when the body is offered a new organ – a vital and healthy organ – the body can try to kill it off. The body’s immune system recognizes the new organ as foreign, so even as the new organ replaces a failed one, the body can try to kill off the healthy one just because it is new.

In general our society discusses acceptance and accomplishment, but rarely is there any satisfactory conversation around rejection. We try to ignore or sooth ourselves when confronted with rejection; some rare times we try to learn from it. But if the mechanical functioning of our body can refuse something it needs to survive, perhaps rejection has not been accorded appropriate respect.

When another person rejects us our primal instinct is to ask why. We ponder our deficiencies, comparing ourselves to the hallucinated non-rejected ones – asking over and over what do they have that I lack…consider though that body receiving a new organ. The doctors have run multiple tests to find as close a match as possible – same blood type, similar antigens, then the patient must take medicine to suppress the body’s own instinct to defend itself. Yet no one would blame the receiver nor the organ for be incompatible.

What happens if rejection has no rhyme or reason? If we have done our due diligence and are taking the best shot possible, and still we fail, then perhaps rejection is a simple statistical necessity; nothing can have a hundred percent success rate so why do we ever expect one.