Otis Gray  - We Regret to Inform You

 

 

On paper, you'd think that you'd hit rock bottom when you just answered a Craigslist ad for a job wrapping a naked guy in duct tape in South Philadelphia. [audience laughter] But you'd be wrong. Rock bottom is not getting that job. [audience laughter] Yeah, he turned me away at the door when he opened it and was visibly shocked that Otis was not a girl's name, which is both stupid and sexist. But I had just spent four years at art school as a sculptor and had an absent father, so I was accustomed to rejection to that point. [audience laughter] But at least with the duct tape, man, there was a reason why I got turned away. 

 

Shortly after, when I got rejected for the Fulbright scholarship, there was not a reason. I got a form email saying, “You have not received the Fulbright scholarship. It is not our policy to explain the reasons for this outcome. Please do not contact us.” I had spent nearly a year pouring my entire soul into this application. You submit like your entire person, you have letters of recommendation, your entire body of work, your grades, a personal statement that defines you to your core, everything. 

 

I know that the normal response to rejection is generally sadness and disappointment. My whole life I've dealt with it, like, “Okay, tell me, how can I fix this? What can I do? Why?” And now, I was so mad. You can't tell me which part of me wasn't good enough which was not a unique feeling, because while I do joke about my daddy issues, it was not his policy to explain the reasons for that outcome either. 

 

About a month later, after I got rejected, a former professor who knew I wasn't doing so hot called me and said, “Hey, you seem desperate. [audience laughter] How do you want a job writing personalized rejection letters to high school students?” [audience laughter] I have never been so good at something so quickly in my entire life. [audience laughter] So, this foundation, what they did was they gave money to high school students pursuing summer programs in the arts. My job was to take the judges feedback and craft it into these little personalized rejection letters. I was impartial. I didn't see them or their work, just the critique of it. That year, I wrote 160 letters. And these things were Shakespearean. [audience laughter] 

 

I was taking all this untethered rage I felt from being ambiguously rejected and making them into these poetic little compliment sandwiches like, “Dear, Layla, you know, your use of lights and dark in your charcoal is phenomenal, and you have a really unique grasp of composition for your age. But you got to get out there and explore, girl. Get out of your comfort zone. Relentlessly, follow your curiosity into the darkness. You owe this to yourself, Layla.” [audience laughter] 

 

I was like the general patent to this little brigade of art marines all over the country. The more that I wrote, the more they started coming out like, “Dear, Patrick, your passion at 14 shines through. And you play the oboe like you sold your soul to the goddamn devil, boy. You don't even need this scholarship. [audience laughter] You get that oboe money, Patrick.” [audience laughter]

 

Doing this, I felt so whole because these kids were putting themselves out there, open to judgment and I had the opportunity to give them the feedback that I never got. Then I had to write one letter. It was a young dancer. I'm going to call her Sarah. And Sarah was applying for one of the best ballet programs in the entire country. And the judges said that she was really talented, but they were afraid that if she went to this program, they were afraid that her spirit would beaten down by the judgment implicit in the ballet world around body image and that she might better off doing a program in contemporary dance instead. 

 

So, now, I knew that this girl, Sarah, probably didn't look like your stereotypical ballerina. It was my job to tell her that a factor in why she wasn't accepted was a part of her that she maybe couldn't change. I had spent all my time up till then searching for reason and answers and asking why. But this was a bad reason. I thought about my dad. If the answer is just you, what do you do with that? So, I reckon with this, and I agonized over it for days and then I sat down and I wrote, “Dear, Sarah, in the future, you would greatly benefit from an intensive ballet program. But a program in contemporary dance might be exactly what you need as well. The choice is yours. You have the passion, and the drive and the talent to just thrive in any environment you choose to go into. So, just go and do it.”

 

After four years of this job and over 700 personally crushed dreams, [audience laughter] I can confidently say that that wholeness that I felt was not writing well-reasoned rejections. It was learning that it just didn't always matter. It didn't matter which part of me wasn't good enough, especially if it was a reason that I couldn't change or a reason that I would never change. I hope that if these beautiful little weirdos take anything from these letters, it's that you should never ever beg someone to tell why you aren't good enough. You go and you show them how fucking wrong they were. Thank you.