I’m not someone who falls apart every time I get rejected.

I’ve built a life in the arts. Rejection is part of the furniture. I know a no is not always a verdict on the quality of the work. I know decisions are shaped by timing, taste, fashion, priorities, funding, panel dynamics, language, fit and luck. I’ve been part of those decisions myself. I know the sensible things people say afterwards. I’ve said them. I believe many of them.

Which is exactly why I want to be honest about this.

For me, the most damaging part of an application process is often not the rejection. It is everything that happens before the rejection has even arrived: the hope, the effort, the self-exposure, the adrenaline, the waiting, the private embarrassment of wanting it as much as you do.

The hardest part is not always being told no.

Sometimes it is recovering from the version of your life you briefly allowed yourself to imagine.

That is the part I think we under-name.

Applications do not only assess you. They dysregulate you.

They ask for exactly the things that can become dangerous when you are already under strain: intensity, projection into the future, emotional investment, self-scrutiny, forced coherence and sustained uncertainty.

They ask you to imagine a better future vividly enough to sell it, while also preparing yourself for the possibility that nothing will change. They ask you to take something alive, complicated and unresolved, and make it sound coherent, strategic and irresistible. They ask you to believe in the possibility strongly enough to animate it, but not so strongly that it destroys you if the answer is no.

That is not a neutral state to be in.

I want to be clear about what I am not saying. I am not saying every rejection is a crisis. I am not saying artists should never have to make a case for their work. I am not saying anyone who struggles with applications is automatically owed the opportunity.

I am saying that when my mental health is at its worst, application processes can feel almost custom-built to create the state I am trying hardest to avoid.

They ask for stamina from the exact part of me that may already be fraying.

One time, we went through an application process that lasted three months. Multiple stages. Weeks of work. We made it to the top 20. The top 10 got at least a year of business support. The top 5 got money too, but honestly, by that point, the money almost felt less like a prize and more like reimbursement for the process itself.

Top 20 was one of those strange positions that sounds good when you say it out loud and feels awful when you live inside it.

Too far in to dismiss. Too far out for anything to come of it.

We had invested real time, real care, real energy, real hope. We had let ourselves imagine what that support might do. Not in some ridiculous fantasy way. Just in the plain, practical way people do when they are exhausted and something might genuinely help.

What would it ease? What could it unlock? What breathing room might it create? What might change?

And then nothing changed.

That was the bruise.

Not only that we didn’t get it, but that we had spent three months feeding a process that had already taken so much by the time the answer arrived.

I think this is why applications are so often misunderstood by people who reduce them to admin. From the outside, the visible output can look quite ordinary: a form, a proposal, a few written answers, maybe a deck, maybe an interview. But the actual process is much bigger than the paperwork it produces.

The form is only the surface evidence of what it took to complete it.

What it took, in our case, was weeks of trying to make something complicated feel crisp. Trying to sound clear without sounding flattened. Ambitious without sounding unrealistic. Serious without sounding dead. Distinct without becoming unreadable.

We had to turn instinct into strategy, values into outcomes, need into momentum, uncertainty into vision. We had to gather up something living and translate it into a version of itself that could survive being scored.

That is labour.

And more than that, it is a very particular kind of labour. Not just intellectual, but emotional. Not just time-consuming, but regulating.

A good application often requires a state of controlled belief. You have to care enough for the application to have force, but not so much that the process consumes you. You have to let hope in, because without hope the whole thing becomes impossible to animate, but you also have to stay detached enough that if it all disappears, you can keep functioning.

That balancing act is hard enough on a good day.

On a bad one, it can become dangerous.

I do not mean that dramatically. I mean it plainly. There have been times in my life when the ingredients of an application process have created the exact wrong conditions for my brain. The way hope gets tangled with pressure. The way wanting something can curdle into embarrassment. The way uncertainty can make you overcompensate. The way effort stops being proportionate and starts becoming a way of managing panic.

The way you begin to think, irrationally but sincerely, that if you can just make this perfect enough, maybe you can protect yourself from disappointment.

Of course you can’t.

But that doesn’t stop the mind from trying.

This is one of the truths I keep returning to: over-efforting is not always a sign of admirable commitment. Sometimes it is a stress response.

Sometimes it is what happens when the stakes feel too high, the resources feel too low, and the process invites you to believe that clarity and hard work might finally buy you safety.

When that happens, you do not just complete the application. You try to outrun uncertainty by doing more. Another draft. A better sentence. A cleaner deck. A sharper budget. One more proof point. One more version. One more attempt to make the whole thing impossible to misunderstand.

Some of that effort may genuinely improve the work.

Some of it is anxiety trying to make itself useful.

It is the nervous system trying to create control where there is none.

And then, when the rejection comes, or the near miss, you are not only dealing with disappointment. You are dealing with the aftermath of having driven yourself into a heightened state for weeks or months. The drop. The flatness. The shame of having hoped so hard. The strange feeling of having wound yourself around a future that no longer exists.

This is the part I find hardest to admit: there is shame attached to wanting.

Not because wanting is wrong. But because wanting makes you visible to yourself.

You see how much you hoped. You see how quickly you pictured the relief. You see how far your mind travelled into the possibility. You see the tiny private arrangements you started making with a future that had not happened yet.

The money. The support. The recognition. The room to breathe. The sense that maybe this would be the thing that shifted something.

And then, if the answer is no, you have to move out of that imagined future and return to your actual life as though nothing much has happened.

Your inbox is the same. Your bills are the same. Your workload is the same. Your practice is the same. But you are not quite the same, because for a while you had oriented yourself towards the possibility of help.

Sometimes I think the most humiliating part is not the rejection.

It is having to recover from your own hope.

And because this is the arts, because so much of the language around opportunities is dressed up as positivity, generosity and growth, there is often very little space to tell the truth about that aftermath.

You are meant to be gracious. Professional. Encouraged by how far you got. You are meant to take the feedback, take the learning, take the almost, and convert it into resilience.

But I am increasingly suspicious of how often resilience in the arts really means: absorb this privately and come back asking again.

That is the cycle I keep returning to.

The repetition is the cruelest part.

One application on its own may be manageable. Even a bruising one. But application culture does not arrive as a one-off. It arrives as an atmosphere. A career structure. A way of life in which support is nearly always conditional on your willingness to repeatedly explain yourself under pressure.

Again, you are asked to summarise, justify, articulate, prove, contextualise, forecast, align, refine and present.

Again, you are asked to hope.

Again, you are asked to risk dysregulation in exchange for the possibility of being helped.

That, to me, is why applications are not neutral.

They do not simply sort people. They act on people.

They can make you grandiose for a week and hollow the week after. They can make you obsess over wording as though the right phrase might save you. They can make you feel both delusional and not ambitious enough within the same afternoon. They can turn your relationship to your own work slightly strange. They can make your life feel as though it is waiting to be authorised by someone else.

And because this structure is so normalised, a lot of people end up blaming themselves for reacting badly to it.

They tell themselves they need a thicker skin. Better discipline. More emotional distance. More professionalism. I know that’s what I’ve done. I have read the impact as personal weakness rather than a fairly logical response to an extractive system.

But I do not think artists are weak for finding this hard.

I think many of us are having a sane response to an insane arrangement.

An arrangement in which people with unstable incomes and overextended lives are asked to continuously produce polished evidence of their future potential. An arrangement in which hope is necessary to participation, but also one of the very things that makes participation costly. An arrangement in which the ability to keep packaging yourself persuasively through uncertainty becomes almost as important as the work itself.

There is something especially cruel about how little of this is visible once the process ends.

Someone can spend weeks or months contorting themselves to meet the demands of an application, lose, and then be left with nothing legible to show for what the process extracted. No support, no money, no recognition of the labour, not even necessarily a socially acceptable level of grief.

Just the expectation that they quietly reassemble and go again.

That is not just disappointment.

That is a recurring psychological demand placed on people who are often already close to capacity.

And I think the sector gets away with underestimating its seriousness because the visible artefacts are so tidy. A few forms. A few PDFs. A few answers in little boxes. Nothing dramatic. Nothing anyone would instinctively recognise as physically or emotionally dangerous.

But some processes are dangerous in their tidiness.

Some systems do their damage through repetition, through intimate demands, through the requirement to remain coherent while under strain. Through asking people to keep converting inner life into persuasive evidence without ever properly accounting for what that conversion costs.

That is what I want to name.

Just because applications have become a necessary part of the game does not mean they should be treated as sacred, inevitable, or beyond critique. Normalisation is not the same thing as fairness.

If organisations genuinely need information, there are less extractive ways to gather it.

Shorter first-round expressions of interest before full proposals. Paid applicant development once a process becomes long or multi-stage. Voice notes or informal video responses where polished writing is not the thing being assessed. Reusable core information across schemes. Clearer scoring criteria. Faster decisions. Fewer questions. Feedback that actually explains the decision. More honesty about how many people will progress, what chance applicants realistically have, and what level of detail is genuinely needed at each stage.

None of this removes the need to make choices.

But it would at least signal that the sector understands the difference between gathering information and quietly extracting far more than it needs.

Because the problem is not only that applications are boring. It is not even only that they are exploitative. It is that they can create a very particular form of mental and emotional wear: hope, self-exposure, overcompensation, uncertainty, shame, depletion, reset, repeat.

And for some of us, at some points in our lives, that cycle is not a minor inconvenience.

It is the thing that tips the balance.

I don’t want to end this by simply saying all of this is awful and leaving it there.

Partly because I know I will still apply for things. Partly because I know many other artists will too. And partly because, while I think the structure is deeply flawed, I also know that waiting for the structure to become humane is not a sufficient short-term mental health strategy.

So I’ve been trying to get clearer on what actually helps.

Not how to become immune. Not how to suddenly turn myself into someone who can glide through high-stakes uncertainty without feeling a thing. I don’t think that person exists, and I’m not sure I’d want to become them if they did.

More: what helps me protect myself when I can feel an application process starting to get under my skin.

First, I am trying to notice when effort becomes overcompensation.

There is a point in some applications where the work stops being useful and starts becoming an anxious attempt to outrun uncertainty. I know that state well. The compulsive redrafting. The sudden belief that one more sentence, one cleaner paragraph, one cleverer framing device might save me from disappointment.

Sometimes extra effort improves the application. Sometimes it is fear trying to look like professionalism. I am trying to get better at telling the difference.

Second, I am trying to be careful about what I allow myself to build in my head.

Hope is necessary. I don’t think there is any honest way to apply for something meaningful without letting some hope in. But I try to watch the moment when hope turns into premature emotional relocation. When I start mentally moving into the future outcome, spending the money, picturing the relief, reorganising my life around something that has not happened.

That is often the point at which the process becomes most dangerous for me. Not because imagining is bad, but because the comedown is much harder when I have already half-moved in.

Third, I am trying not to make one application carry the weight of my entire life.

This sounds obvious. It is not obvious when you are tired. Or skint. Or desperate for something to shift. Or when the opportunity seems to answer several problems at once.

Financial relief, recognition, momentum, proof, support, self-esteem — some applications arrive with the shimmer of solving far more than they realistically can.

When that happens, I am trying to remind myself: this is one possibility, not a private referendum on whether my life is working.

Fourth, I am trying to plan for the aftermath before I know the outcome.

So much of application culture is built around submission and results, as though those are the only two meaningful moments. But I increasingly think the emotional logistics afterwards deserve just as much care.

What will I do if I get a no? Who can I talk to honestly? What will help me come back down? What can I avoid that day? How do I stop myself from instantly converting pain into self-criticism?

It sounds basic, but having even a loose plan for the aftermath can stop the whole thing from becoming a free fall.

Fifth, I am trying not to experience the reaction as a moral failure.

This one is hard. If an application process tips me into a bad mental state, my first instinct is often to judge myself for that almost immediately. To tell myself I should be more professional, more seasoned, less affected, less porous.

But distress is not always proof of immaturity.

Sometimes it is simply the correct response to a system that has asked too much from you at the wrong time.

And finally, whenever I can, I try to speak more honestly with other artists about what this stuff actually feels like.

Not in a performative doom spiral. Not to romanticise collapse. Just to puncture the false professionalism of pretending these processes only ever cost us time.

Some of the most helpful conversations I’ve had have been the least polished ones. The ones where somebody admits they felt ashamed of how much they wanted it. Or destabilised by the waiting. Or weirdly empty after a near miss. Or furious not only because they didn’t get the thing, but because of how much of themselves they had to hand over to be considered for it.

Those conversations do not fix the structure.

But they do make it harder for the structure to isolate us inside our private versions of the same pain.

I don’t have a neat answer to any of this.

I still apply. I still hope. I still get it wrong. I still sometimes let an opportunity take up too much psychic space.

But I think I am learning that protecting yourself is not the same as caring less.

Sometimes it is just learning how to care without handing over quite so much of yourself in the process.

Hey! Thanks for reading to the end. If this felt familiar, subscribe for future essays on art, ambition, visibility, and the realities of creative work. I’ll do my best to keep it fun.

Rewatching Baby Reindeer recently, I found myself returning to a feeling I’ve had before, but never quite managed to articulate.

Mercifully, my life doesn’t mirror Donny’s in any obvious way. I’m not a comedian, I haven’t lived through the abuse he has, and I’m not trying to break into the London television world. But somewhere inside all that specificity is a feeling that stretches much further than the show’s own circumstances. Something about ambition, humiliation, and the peculiar pain of wanting to be seen.

It also made me realise I have a real soft spot for this kind of story: the ambitious creative person aching for recognition. Moulin Rouge, La La Land, Dreamgirls, Whiplash, Chicago, Tick, Tick... Boom! — and perhaps my favourite of all, The Devil Wears Prada.

There’s obviously a huge range there: actors, writers, performers, musicians. But what connects them, for me, is the same thing. I desperately want to see each of them make it. To live their dream through talent and sheer force of ambition.

And Baby Reindeer, difficult as it is to watch, belongs in that category too. It’s deeply moving, full of complexity, funny, and devastatingly sad.

I think what fascinates me most is this: a lot of artists know the feeling of living with some huge internal conviction that there is something in you worth seeing, while the external world keeps offering patchy evidence. Delay. Indifference. Near-misses. Smaller opportunities than you hoped for. Praise that never quite converts into safety.

That creates a horrible split. Part of you knows your desire is legitimate. Another part starts to feel ridiculous for having it at all.

And Donny lives right in that split.

He is talented enough to keep hoping, wounded enough to need that hope to mean more than it should, and insecure enough that recognition does not simply represent success — it starts to represent salvation. That’s what feels so relatable to me, and I suspect to many others too: the point where ambition gets fused to self-worth.

In the show, success is never just money or status. It means being chosen, validated, pulled out of obscurity, told that you matter. So when Darrien dangles creative approval over Donny, he is not just offering a job. He is offering him a way to repair something much deeper.

And that got me thinking about my own creativity. And the art world it inhabits.

I’m a visual artist, writer, and co-founder of Short Supply, and most of my adult life has unfolded not only through making work, but through building contexts around it: writing, curating, organising, shaping projects, creating content, and supporting other artists to keep going in an industry that can be exhilarating and bruising in equal measure.

My creativity has always been tied up with questions of visibility, access, opportunity, and survival, which is perhaps why this particular knot of ambition, recognition, and self-worth feels so familiar to me.

Or more specifically: what it does to a person to spend years trying to build a life in a field that runs on conviction, mystique, social codes, and very little regular reassurance.

For a long time, I read some of my harder feelings about this industry as evidence of private failure. I thought I needed to toughen up. Become less porous. Want less. Take things less personally. Stop pinning so much on outcomes. I thought maybe the answer was to become cooler, harder, less hopeful. Perhaps then the whole thing would feel more manageable.

As with most things of that nature, it’s never quite that simple.

The longer I’ve spent in the art world, the more I think some of these feelings are not the product of individual weakness at all, but a fairly logical response to the conditions many of us are working within. If you spend your twenties in a space shaped by precarity, delayed recognition, unstable income, endless self-presentation, vague thresholds of legitimacy, and constant pressure to remain visible, I think it would be stranger to come out of it untouched than changed by it.

There is a particular kind of psychological friction in knowing that you are talented while not always having a career that reflects it.

That sentence alone feels a bit cheeky to write down. It risks sounding arrogant, delusional, deeply annoying. But I suspect a lot of artists will recognise the feeling instantly. You know when an idea is strong. You know when your instincts are good. You know the quality of your taste, the depth of your thinking, the years of labour sitting behind what you make. And yet the world around you can remain oddly inconsistent in what it chooses to reward.

This is not exactly breaking news. The arts have never functioned as a clean meritocracy, and it would be daft to pretend otherwise. Timing, geography, class, confidence, access, admin capacity, likeability, money, luck, and whoever happened to be in the room all play their part. But knowing that intellectually doesn’t always soften the emotional impact.

Because the mismatch rarely stays practical.

It doesn’t remain a simple matter of “this industry is imperfect” or “things take time.” Left unchecked, it starts to seep inward. You begin to wonder whether the issue is not structural at all, but personal. You push yourself harder. You work longer. You become more strategic, more prolific, more available, more present, more public, more useful, more legible. You tell yourself this is normal because, in many ways, it is normalised. The arts are full of people running slightly beyond what is sustainable and calling it commitment.

And perhaps, to a degree, it is.

But there comes a point when ambition stops feeling like momentum and starts feeling like a response to hurt.

That, to me, is the more interesting bit. Also the less flattering one.

Because I don’t think the problem is ambition itself. Ambition can be brilliant. It can be clarifying, generative, animating. It can pull things into existence that would otherwise remain a note in your phone or a half-formed fantasy muttered to a friend over a drink. It can keep a person going when there is very little external evidence that continuing is a sensible thing to do.

What interests me more is what happens when ambition is asked to do too much.

When it is no longer simply about making better work, reaching more people, or building a sustainable career. When it also starts carrying questions of self-worth, proof, safety, desirability, legitimacy, belonging. When success stops being a professional desire and starts shimmering with the promise of private repair.

This is where things get emotionally dicey.

Because the art world asks a great deal of people who care deeply. It asks for conviction in the face of indifference. It asks for stamina under conditions of uncertainty. It asks people to continue producing, applying, networking, posting, showing up, keeping going, making themselves known in systems that can be opaque at best and extractive at worst. It asks people to believe in themselves for a very long time with very little confirmation.

In some cases, it practically puts that endurance in a little frame and hangs it on the wall.

There is so much talk of resilience in the arts, and far less talk of what resilience often looks like up close. It can look admirable, yes. It can also look like over-functioning. It can look like constant self-surveillance. It can look like an inability to rest without guilt. It can look like a low-level panic dressed up as discipline. It can look like becoming so used to instability that it starts to feel not only normal, but vaguely romantic.

The struggling artist is, after all, one of culture’s favourite old characters. Very chic in theory. Less fun when it’s you.

At its worst, the whole thing can feel a little sinister, in the quiet way systems do when they learn how to feed on your hope while giving very little back.

The art world is full of things that are spoken about as opportunities and experienced, in reality, as prolonged tests of emotional tolerance. Tests of how long you can continue under-recognised without turning the whole thing against yourself. Tests of how much ambiguity you can absorb before it begins to distort how you see your own work.

And because this is the arts — because so many of us care not just professionally but existentially about what we do — the stakes rarely feel proportionate.

A missed opportunity is rarely just a missed opportunity.

A period of silence is rarely just a quiet patch.

A lack of recognition can begin to feel like a referendum on your instincts, your judgement, your talent, your timing, even your basic right to still believe in yourself.

All of this makes the desire to be seen feel much hotter than it perhaps ought to.

This is where Baby Reindeer stayed with me.

Not because the show is “about the art world,” and not because I think artistic ambition is anywhere near comparable to the abuse Donny suffers. It isn’t. But there is something deeply recognisable in the way he longs to be chosen, and in the shame that wraps itself around that longing. There is something painfully familiar in that fantasy of being scooped up out of obscurity by someone or something that can finally confirm your value.

I think a lot of artists live with some version of that fantasy.

The fantasy of the right person seeing you properly and changing everything.

The fantasy of finally having your little Anne Hathaway montage moment, minus the emotional devastation and with better shoes.

The fantasy that recognition, once it arrives, will settle something older and more private inside you.

But I think this is where the story has to change.

Because look: my career may not be what I once thought it might be.

It may not resemble the sleeker, more cinematic version I had in my head. The one tied up neatly with applause, certainty, and a final-act payoff. But it has made me a better, more interesting person. It has given me a more complex understanding of other people, and of myself. It has given me fulfilment in ways the imagined version in my head never really could.

I’m also aware that perhaps I let those films influence my own journey a little too much. Perhaps we all do. I’m an advocate for imagination, always will be, but I know mine hasn’t always been my friend. I know it can run ahead of me. I know it can make a dream look clean when it is actually tangled up with other things. I know it can be weaponised too — a dangled carrot, a fantasy rooted in hidden truths, a story that keeps you going long after it has stopped being good for you.

And when I sit back and think about what an eleven-year-old version of me might make of my life now, I don’t think the career stuff would bother them all that much.

I think they’d be far more interested in the fact that I get to make things. That I’ve built a life around creativity. That I’ve met extraordinary people. That I’ve remained open. That I’ve kept going. That I’ve made something from all of it, even if it doesn’t always resemble the version I once imagined for myself.

That doesn’t mean humility is the opposite of ambition. I don’t think it is. I can appreciate my own growth and still want more for myself. I can be grateful and hungry. I can recognise what I have and still feel the pull of what I haven’t done yet.

But I do think learning to see the separation between those things as clearly as I see my ambitions in my mind’s eye will shape the next ten years of my working life.

Because perhaps that is the real task: not to kill ambition, but to stop confusing it with self-worth. To stop handing it responsibility for wounds it cannot heal. To let it be a creative force, not a private verdict.

And at the risk of making this sound a little too much like “someone else always has it worse,” I do think learning to appreciate what I already have has been one of the most transformative lessons available to me.

Not as consolation, settling or a polite little backup plan for if the big dream never arrives.

But as a way of living now, rather than forever in rehearsal for some imagined future version of my life.

Maybe that’s the shift.

Not becoming less ambitious.

Just becoming less willing to let ambition narrate my entire existence.

Perhaps the real work is not to want less, but to stop asking success to tell me who I am.

Hey! Thanks for reading to the end. If this felt familiar, subscribe for future essays on art, ambition, visibility, and the realities of creative work. I’ll do my best to keep it fun.