We’ve all been there, in the heart crushing, tear jerking, and soul diminishing moment when we are rejected by something or even someone we wanted. It can truly make you feel like the scum of the earth and can even make the most happy of people feel so much melancholy they’ll start to quote Charles Bukowski non-stop.

Sorry Charlie Day is a day to accept your dejections, put the biggest smile on your face and tell the people whom have rejected you in your life to stick it where the sun don’t shine. Life is too short to get stuck onto the failures that only drive us toward success. Carpe diem, live in the moment and only know that any rejection you have faced or will face in the future will only push you toward a greater and more successful path in life.

“It is not our differences that divide us,” said Audre Lorder author of Our Dead Behind Us: Poems. “It is our inability to recognize, accept, and celebrate those differences.”

Push through the sorrow and self-pity and use your past experiences as fuel for the beautifully cognitive engine that is your brain and strive for a greater accomplishment; success. People are going to turn you down, you are going to have your heart broken, and you are going to feel as though you are at the bottom of the totem pole but it is the way that you handle your past experiences and push them to enhance your future endeavors. Life is 10% of what happens to you and 90% of how you react to it.

So be encouraged on this fine holiday to look at the past and say, “Sorry Charlie,” because there is no changing it but you have the power to take the past and use it to strive toward and better tomorrow.

“The past can hurt. But the way I see it, you can either run from it, or learn from it.” –Rafiki, The Lion King