When Women Reject Us
What the shadow teaches us about becoming whole
I flew to Denver with my mom and sister last month to see Olivia Dean on her The Art of Loving tour. It was meant to be a small pilgrimage of sorts: a mother-daughter weekend, music we loved, meals we didn’t have to cook, and a chance to step outside our ordinary lives.
My mom is a full-time caregiver for my father, who has dementia, so planning trips away is not only essential to her well-being—it’s also incredibly complicated to pull off.
Before the trip had even begun, we were almost to the airport at 5:00 a.m. when I realized I had forgotten my wallet.
This is NOT something I do. Or at least, it wasn’t something I had ever done before.
We turned around, drove home, retrieved it, called the airline, and caught a later flight.
Instead of waiting it out at home, we drove to Little Italy, a neighborhood near the San Diego airport, parked, and took a little nap while the rest of the world woke up.
Then I remembered Morning Glory, a restaurant I’d wanted to try for years but had never been willing to brave the notoriously long wait. We were there early enough to get in right when they opened.
My mom ordered their best selling Japanese soufflé pancakes, and they were some of the most delicious pancakes either of us had ever eaten. I told our server it was her birthday because we were celebrating early—about two weeks early—but when it’s this hard to get away, you celebrate every milestone whenever you can.
Our server brought us another delightful concoction with a macaron perched on top, somehow spray-painted with my mom’s name in edible lettering.
Aside from the lingering heartburn I was nursing from a sip of red wine the night before, it was one of my favorite meals to date.
Our next stop in our quest to kill time was Liberty Station, another beautiful pocket of San Diego, where we wandered through the enigmatic shop Pigment and an adorable yarn store called Apricot Yarn.
It was as though my forgotten wallet had interrupted the plan so that we could enjoy this pocket of time to not be rushed…my mom and I savored it.
Maybe that was the first lesson of the weekend.
Not every disruption is a disaster.
What if the thing that throws you off course is also the thing that slows you down enough to notice your life?
We arrived at the airport with plenty of time to stroll to our gate. While we waited, my mom noticed a woman traveling alone with her baby. The baby was restless, and the mother kept nodding off before jolting herself awake again.
“I’m going to see if I can help her,” my mom said.
She walked over, placed a gentle hand on the woman’s shoulder, and said, “Close your eyes, dear.”
The young mother immediately began to cry.
I came over to help entertain the baby, and soon two other women nearby joined our little rescue mission. One offered the mother a giant cookie she had just purchased.
For a little while, a group of strangers formed a tiny village around a woman who desperately needed to be seen and permitted to rest.
When it was finally time to board, she hugged us and thanked us for seeing her.
That moment stayed with me.
Women showing up for women. Seeing what is needed without being asked and saying, in our own way: You don’t have to do all of this alone.
Throughout the weekend, I kept encountering women like this.
A friend I hadn’t seen in years happened to be seated directly in front of me on the plane. A waitress remembered my name after serving us the night before. At the concert, two young women taught my sister and me how to pose for a “Gen Z” photo. They snapped ours, we snapped theirs, and we all told one another how cute we looked.
The weekend seemed to be about connection, specifically, female connection.
And then, somehow, it became about rejection too.
When we took our seats at the show, two women stood directly in front of my mom and me for nearly the entire performance.
My mom is 72 and didn’t want to stand all night, and from our seats, we couldn’t see the stage.
Now, I am all for people standing and dancing at concerts. I would never ask someone to sit down during a song clearly meant to be moved to. But usually the crowd operates somewhat collectively and sits during the slow songs, right?
Right?
I actually have no idea what the etiquette is here. Maybe I was being an uptight forty-something year old white lady. Maybe it was my sciatica that was flaring up or it could’ve been my raging period, which had started that day.
Whatever it was, these chicks were getting on my nerves.
During one of the slower songs—when Ms. Dean herself was sitting—I asked the women if they might sit down for a bit so my 72-year-old mom could see.
They turned on me as if I had just asked them for a kidney and for the rest of the show, they mocked me, called me crazy, made comments about me, and tried to provoke me.
I spent the remainder of the concert breathing through the discomfort while simultaneously trying to enjoy the soulful-girl-power tunes Olivia was serving up.
After years of self-reclamation, I’ve gotten pretty good at turning inward when something activates me and asking myself, What part of me is being activated right now?
At first, I told myself what they were saying didn’t matter.
They didn’t know me. They could barely make out my face in the dark. Logically, I understood that whatever they believed about me was, at least in part, a projection of who they needed me to be in that moment.
But my body knew it wasn’t that simple. The experience still hurt like a bruise somewhere inside me, and I couldn’t immediately find the source of the pain.
Rejection has a way of slipping through the cracks of our present lives and finding every former version of us who has ever felt unwanted.
When I looked more closely, I found my inner seven-year-old girl somewhere between my heart and my gut.
She was back in her first ballet class, feeling awkward and out of place, unsure whether she belonged in the world.
She had already begun learning that belonging required a performance.
She believed she needed to reject the world in order to be saved, while secretly aching to experience the world—to be part of it rather than separate from it.
That little girl is still tender.
She still wonders whether she is good enough, braces a little when someone misunderstands her and fears that being disliked might mean being cast out.
The women at the concert did not create that wound.
They simply stepped on the place where it already lived.
This is the uncomfortable invitation of shadow work.
The shadow is not merely the part of us that is mean, selfish, jealous, or angry. It is also every exiled part of ourselves we learned to hide in order to remain acceptable.
It is the needy girl. The angry woman. The one who wants to be seen. The one who hates being misunderstood. The one who still wishes everyone would think she is good.
At the concert, one part of me wanted to rise above it all.
Another part wanted to throw down.
One part wanted to prove I was right, while another wanted to disappear.
And beneath all of those parts was a little girl asking:
Why don’t they like me?
Shadow work doesn’t require us to pretend bad behavior is acceptable. It doesn’t ask us to spiritualize cruelty or deny that something hurts.
Shadow work asks us to become curious about why certain experiences carry so much power.
For me, it meant staying with the girl inside me who felt rejected instead of rejecting her too.
I don’t believe I deserved the hostility I received from those women, even if I did break some cardinal concert rule. Perhaps they needed me to be the screen onto which they projected something that belonged to them.
But I also don’t want to turn them into one-dimensional villains in a story where I am wholly innocent and evolved.
I don’t know what they carried into that arena.
I don’t know what my request touched inside them.
I only know what it touched inside me.
Maybe this is what it means to become more whole: not becoming untouchable, but becoming willing to sit beside every part of ourselves that gets touched and feels pain.
I have spent most of my life wanting to be liked and understood.
It’s as though I’ve wanted my goodness to be visible enough that no one could possibly misinterpret me.
What I’ve learned through the shadow work I’ve done so far is that being human means accepting that we will sometimes be misunderstood.
People will create versions of us that we don’t recognize or align with.
They will love us, leave us, see us, miss us, praise us, misunderstand us, and project onto us. Our work is not to control every version of ourselves living in someone else’s mind. Our work is to remain connected to the person we know ourselves to be.
I don’t want anyone to hate or dislike me. But I am learning that I can survive it if they do.
Through shadow work, my ego is slowly loosening its attachment to being seen as good by everyone.
The wounded part of me still grieves when I am rejected, but she no longer has to face that grief alone. I sit beside her now and tell her:
You do not need to reject the world to belong to God.
You do not need to disappear to be safe.
You do not have to earn your place here by being pleasing, quiet, righteous, or universally loved.
You are allowed to experience the world, take up space, and be fully human.
When I remember this girls’ trip now, I don’t want the women at the concert to eclipse all the other women I encountered that weekend.
I want to remember both.
The women who saw me and the women who rejected me.
The exhausted mother who let us hold some of her burden. The strangers who became a tiny village. The young women who showed us how to pose for a cool photo and the women who misunderstood me.
Most importantly I want to remember the way I learned to accompany the scared little girl inside myself through all of it.
The practice is learning to hold both.
We are not fixed moments, we’re unfolding events and we’re changing all the time, like weather moving across the sky.
I am not the seven-year-old girl who felt she had to choose between belonging and being fully alive, although she is still part of me. And now, when she feels rejected, I know how to find her and hold her hand.
And instead of asking the whole world to approve of us, I remind her:
We already belong.
With care,
Chrissy