Rejection is something that most people dread. The fear of rejection has moved some people to great lengths to avoid this unfortunate experience. This was the case for me too. However, as weird as it sounds, getting rejected was probably one of the best experiences of my life.

I remember it like it was yesterday. I was in my freshman year of high school, the blooming of youth and awkwardness. At that time, I had developed a newfound desire for companionship. I saw couples all around my school, and I badly wanted that for myself.

I knew just as much about asking a girl out back then as I did about quantum physics now – that being absolutely nothing. I had set my eyes on a random girl I thought was cute back then. However, I was nowhere near being a social butterfly. I couldn’t even ask for extra ketchup packets, let alone ask out a real girl. Despite that, I continued to dream about finding my perfect match.

I still don’t know how I did it, whether it was confidence, hormones or some unholy mix of the two, but I decided to muster up the courage to walk up to her desk. Clutching the half scribbled confession note in my hand, I stuck it on her desk and scrambled back to my seat.

As the hours passed, I felt the anxiety slowly pile up. Everything I felt I could be, and everything I couldn’t be, flooded through my head. Whether or not my confession worked was slowly eating me from the inside out. I didn’t entirely know why I was feeling like this.

Finally, at the end of the day when I finally walked up to my locker, I felt a tap on my shoulder. When I turned around, the girl I had confessed to was standing right there. I felt my cheeks flush. This was it, the moment of truth. I was met with the words “I don’t really like you like that.”

After squeezing out a weak “no problem,” I limped away in sadness. But inside, there was this strange feeling of relief. I couldn’t realize it then, but I needed to get rejected because without it, I wouldn’t realize that I needed to be myself.