Rejection is Redirection: Building My Own Door
My life has been far from fun or perfect. Behind every accomplishment people celebrate is usually a failure they never saw and, often, a complete meltdown that only a few people did.
So here is my shameless list of failures, rejections, wrong turns, and moments when I genuinely thought everything was over.
I failed my first pilot written exam.
During flight training, I also nearly took off from the wrong side of the runway before my solo evaluation, putting me frighteningly close to a head-on collision with an aircraft coming from the opposite direction.
I remember thinking, Maybe I am not meant to fly.
When you make a mistake that serious, confidence does not disappear quietly. It collapses all at once. I questioned my judgment, my abilities, and whether I could ever trust myself in a cockpit again.
But aviation taught me that confidence is not the belief that you will never make a mistake. It is knowing that you can confront a mistake honestly, learn from it completely, and become safer because of it.
I returned to the material. I listened more carefully. I trained harder. I learned that preparation is not about proving that you are naturally talented; it is about respecting the responsibility you have taken on.
Today, I hold my private pilot license and have flown across multiple states on both coasts of the United States.
That failure did not prove I could not fly. It taught me what kind of pilot I needed to become.
I was rejected from what I thought was my dream university.
At the time, Georgia Tech felt like the entire future I had imagined for myself. If I had been accepted, I would have committed immediately.
When the rejection came, I cried in my mom’s lap for three days straight. I was so consumed by the one institution that did not choose me that I could barely feel excited about the three acceptances that arrived afterward.
That rejection exposed how easily we can confuse a specific opportunity with our entire destiny.
We decide that one school, one company, one person, or one outcome is the only doorway into the life we want. When that door closes, it feels as if the entire future has disappeared with it.
But one rejection cannot see the full scale of your life.
I was later accepted into an even more competitive institution: Cornell University. During my first week of freshman year, NASA’s Chief Technologist invited me to join his research lab.
The place I thought I needed was not the place where my life was waiting for me.
Georgia Tech’s rejection taught me that disappointment and misdirection can feel identical in the moment. Sometimes, you only understand years later that the path closing in front of you was quietly turning you toward the life you had been asking for.
I did not receive a return offer after my first internship at Blue Origin.
I remember crying in my dorm's lounge at 2 a.m. with my best friend.
I had attached so much meaning to that return offer. In my mind, receiving it would confirm that I was talented, capable, and deserving of a future in aerospace. Not receiving it felt like proof of the opposite.
But a company’s decision is not an objective measurement of your potential. Sometimes, rejection is not saying, You are not good enough. Sometimes, it is saying, This role is not large enough or right enough for who you are becoming.
Looking back, I am grateful that my path did not end with the career I had envisioned at nineteen.
Today, I am not working as the systems engineer I once assumed I should become. I am a responsible engineer designing astronaut life-support systems, my actual dream job.
I also have the rare gift of working for someone I deeply admire: a Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree whose patents and innovations have advanced the field. She is the kind of leader I can look at and think, I want to be like you when I grow up. She cares about my development, believes in what I can become, and consistently has my best interests at heart.
I work for one of my role models. That is a gift I could not have planned for.
The rejection from Blue Origin taught me that prestige and alignment are not the same thing. Being chosen by a famous company does not automatically mean you are in the role where you will grow, contribute, or feel most alive.
Sometimes, losing the opportunity you wanted creates room for the work you were actually meant to do.
My relationship with my partner of three and a half years ended.
One of the reasons he gave was that I focused too much on my career and did not give enough of myself to the relationship.
That ending forced me to ask painful questions. Was I too ambitious? Did wanting an extraordinary life make me difficult to love? Would I always have to choose between being deeply committed to another person and being deeply committed to my purpose?
For a while, I treated my ambition as something I needed to apologize for.
But losing that relationship forced me to sit alone with the life I was building. Without the future I had imagined with someone else, I had to decide what I wanted my own future to become.
I poured myself into my work, my research, and the questions I could not stop thinking about. That redirection ultimately helped me advance and go all in on a spaceflight assignment with Virgin Galactic as its youngest research astronaut, advancing dedicated research on menstrual health in space.
The breakup did not magically create that opportunity. But the person I became afterward did.
Heartbreak taught me that not everyone who loves you will understand the scale of what you are trying to build. It also taught me that the right love should not require me to become smaller, quieter, or less devoted to my purpose.
I can learn to love people better without learning to abandon myself.
I have constantly battled the belief that I am not enough.
This may be the failure that repeats itself most often.
Even after the internships, awards, research, and opportunities, I still have moments when I question my worth. I wonder whether I belong in the room, whether I have done enough to deserve my place, or whether everyone will eventually realize that I am not as capable as they thought.
But that insecurity forced me to do something essential: understand my own value.
I learned how to pitch myself, not by pretending to be perfect, but by reflecting honestly on what I bring to a team, what I have survived, what I care about, and what I am still working to become.
I learned that self-belief is not a personality trait some people are lucky enough to possess. It is a practice. It is built every time you advocate for yourself while your voice shakes, submit the application you feel underqualified for, walk into a room where no one looks like you, or continue building after someone tells you no.
Most importantly, feeling inadequate pushed me to find my village: the mentors, friends, managers, collaborators, and loved ones who remind me of who I am when I temporarily forget.
Strength does not mean never needing reassurance. Sometimes, strength is knowing whose voices to trust when your own becomes cruel.
What failure has taught me
Failure has taught me that the moments that feel most humiliating can become the most instructive.
It taught me that crying does not make me weak. Resilience is not always graceful. Sometimes, it looks like having a complete meltdown and still sending the next application the following morning.
It can reveal where I need more discipline. It can expose where I have placed too much of my self-worth in someone else’s hands. It can show me when I am pursuing a name instead of a purpose. And sometimes, it can redirect me toward a future far greater than the one I was mourning.
Most of all, failure taught me to stop waiting for one perfect door to open.
If a path disappears, I build another.
If the room does not have a place for me, I create the work that makes my presence impossible to ignore.
Priya Abiram is an aerospace engineer, pilot, and astronaut-in-training whose work spans human systems engineering, spacecraft design, bioastronautics research, and women’s health innovation. A 2026 AdaMarie Fellow, she holds both a B.S. and M.Eng. in Aerospace Engineering from Cornell University and has contributed to projects and research with organizations including NASA, Blue Origin, Boeing, VAST, and Inversion Space.
Priya is passionate about designing systems that improve human performance in extreme environments while expanding access, representation, and possibility within STEM.
