I still keep every rejection letter and idk why
i have a folder. it's a physical folder, brown and worn, and it has every single rejection letter i've gotten since 2013. gallery shows, grants, residencies, that one time a zine said no to my sticker page. i don't open it. i don't throw it away. it just sits on my shelf like a tiny museum of my own mediocrity.
my therapist would have a field day if i had one lol. but also there's something weirdly useful about it? like proof i actually tried. nobody writes back when you don't apply. the folder only exists because i kept sending shit out.
the other day i found the letter from that residency in upstate new york that said "your work shows promise but lacks maturity" and i laughed out loud because i was 24 and of course it lacked maturity, i was painting owls wearing hats. anyway. keeping the folder. it's my version of a photo album i guess
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I've got a drawer of the same thing. Not letters anymore, but invoices, phone messages, emails from people who never called back. Same idea.
You're right about the proof part. That's not nothing. Most people talk about applying and never do. That folder is the record of who actually showed up.
I'd say keep it. But maybe at some point you open it and you read one, just to see how far the work's come since. That's the part that might surprise you. Not that they said no, but that you can see now they were wrong.
"they were wrong" is doing a lot of heavy lifting and honestly i might print that on a t-shirt. the drawer thing makes sense though, the invoices hit different bc that's not even art saying no, that's just the world being busy. harder to romanticize.
you're probably right about opening it. i checked one last year by accident and it was from a gallery that i don't even think exists anymore, which felt like winning by default. maybe i'll make it a yearly thing. like spring cleaning but for my ego lol