What is the worst case of total rejection you've ever experienced?

I think that your situation was not necessarily rejection. It seems like it was, but just maybe it is a perspective problem.

You didn’t say that they heckled you, or taunted you in anyway. Did you just stare at them?

In that case you were new, they were “old” to each other likely, or at least had arrived earlier and banded together. They were likely already acquaintances. Their youth likely made them poor hosts.

People are like wild animals too. You can’t necessarily expect to pet the wildlife everywhere you go without lots of enticement.

Sometimes you have to step out of your comfort zone, and make sure that you are not the problem with your interactions with others.

Maybe that will make the rejection more concrete, but at least you’ll know it is not the way you acted that scared away the wildlife.

And so what! Books are people too! Go buy a friend.

Rejection, I’m familiar with the receiving end of it. The worst kind, as well, the sweet polite kind! lol

Stare at them? They were everywhere so I was looking at them. And I didn’t act strange. I was invisible . Totally.
But I certainly don’t need to buy a friend. I have plenty now.

@Aster I wasn’t trying to be inflammatory towards’ya! :) Pweez no reject me!!!!

During my wifes illness her family grouped together and pushed me out of the circle. I think in some ways they blamed me for her being so sick. She nearly died and during almost two full years of my doing everything to care for her. Not once did any of them lift a finger to help. While I was trying to work full time to keep my job and go home 3 ttimes a day to care for my wife they came over and took pictures of how messy the house was and posted them on the web and shared them among themselves. She is now over the worst of it and getting much better. Never once did I try and stop any of her family from seeing her but now I have put them out of my life and haven’t been to their homes or talked with them in over a year. Life has been so sweet without them in it I can’t begin to tell you.

That’s an awful experience, and i’m not surprised you felt like shit.

I used to be a bit of a goth.
On my first day at college, I saw some of the girls from my class heading towards the shops (at lunchtime). One of the girls was someone I had chatted to at our induction morning, so I thought ‘great, I know her’ and thought I’d try to catch up with them.
However, some of them kept turning around to look at me while I was catching up, and lo and behold, they picked up their walking pace.
I didn’t want to really think they were doing that, so I walked faster. They ended up running away from me completely. I was mortified. They were judging me because they thought I looked weird…
I called them all a bunch of F***ing ignorant bitches.

All of them did apologise to me later, but it still really hurt that they could do something like that, something so MEAN.
It felt really sweet though, passing my course with a Distinction when those mean girls only just scraped through with a pass…
Sometimes I like to think what goes around, comes around.

@Summum horrible, inhuman, cruel, childish, good riddance to them.

Never been rejected too badly, because I always approached things too timidly or I would wait until the opportunity came to me (girls coming up to me, making advances on me, e.t.c.). That said, every time I did go out on a limb for a girl (with the exception of my wife), I never did succeed (luckily for me I didn’t put too much stock in these attempts and none of them were really serious). What I did find, and I can’t really call this rejection, because I didn’t make any advances, was that girls who I wanted to like me never turned out liking me (either thought of me as a friend, or had other guys they were interested in).

Actually, come to think of it, there was one time that I took a rejection pretty badly. I was in my late teenage years, I had a crush on this new girl who worked at the same place as me. I finally got the courage to ask her out, she said that she doesn’t date co-workers – then, at a get together at one of our mutual co-workers houses, she hooked up with another co-worker of ours. And she continued to do so right in front of my face for about a week when they were together at work. I was crushed, but needless to say I’m glad I didn’t end up going out with such a w#ore of a girl (she was with another dude the next week). And the worse part – she acted so nice to me the rest of the time when she wasn’t sucking face with this guy or giving him a bj in the bathroom.

The worst rejection I had was actually livable. I was strongly dating a young man that I was very in love with. He called me at 3am one morning to tell me that he had asked another young lady to marry him and he wanted me to be the first person to know. I was in absolute shock, but I was happy for him and told him so.

I moved away from him and his fiance just a few months later. As happy as I was for them, I didn’t need the hurt staring me in the face constantly.

Some years ago, I had a friend that I had a crush on. We used to go see bands play, have lunch, catch the occasional movie. She did a radio show at the local college, and she’d even drive out to my house at 5am to pick me up so I could help her with it. We had fun together. We had even talked about getting an apartment together because our respective living situations kinda sucked, and we got on well enough.

After about 18 months of friendship, I finally opened up that I had feelings for her – I told her via email that I had a crush, but I didn’t say anything further such as “Hey, do you want to try going on an official date?” or anything like that. I simply spilled the beans, short and sweet.

I never heard from her again. Almost a year later I got her address from a mutual friend (she had moved out of town by then) in order to ask her to return my records and CD’s.

I think one of the worst experiences I’ve ever had was actually when I rejected another being.

I was riding my bicycle and on my way back home I befriended a stray (I think) beagle.
I resumed riding at a leisurely pace and the beagle ran along next to me.

When I got to the top of a major downhill section of the road, I succumbed to my need for speed, pedaled faster until I got to about 40 mph, and let gravity take me for the rest of my ride.

I looked back and saw that the poor little thing couldn’t keep up with me.
I resumed looking downhill and continued coasting.
I sure hope he or she found a nice home, or at least someone more deserving of his or her unconditional love than I was. :-(

Actually, that didn’t hurt me back then, but thinking about it now almost breaks my heart.

And that was 50 years ago.

Sorry I didn’t include this in my previous quip, but I didn’t think of it until more than 10 minutes later.