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Let’s Hear it For the Narwhal

Narwhal? Never heard of it? The marine animal that looks like a sleeker version of a dolphin with one tusk protruding from its head. So, naturally, they are nicknamed unicorns of the sea.

But real narwhals are not my subject. I have not seen a narwhal, nor for that matter have I (or anybody else) ever seen a living unicorn. I am talking about the life-size stuffed animal narwhal, the one whose tusk never quite stays up straight, that is featured in television commercials trying to get a gig as a mascot for an insurance company.

The narwhal’s attempts are not simply unsuccessful; they are pathetic, as the one where an elevated platform hikes him up to the window so he can attract the attention of attendees at a corporate meeting. They shut the blinds. It always goes like that for the narwhal: rejection after rejection.

I didn’t pay much attention at first, but over time, I began to think about the message the company wished to communicate: they were so good they didn’t need gimmicks like a life-sized stuffed animal spokesperson. Instead of being impressed by their advertising strategy, however, I began to sympathize with the always-rejected narwhal.

Everybody knows rejection. It is not something that happens only to relatively rare members of the whale family.

I once made my father take a picture of my sister and me so we could enter a charming child contest run by a local newspaper. I might have been charming, but I was also a chubby kid with unruly red curls. I was clearly not charming enough.

Maybe if a narwhal had entered that contest, it would have done better. One informational site I checked described narwhals as “strange and beautiful creatures with long tusks protruding from their heads.” Of course, winning would have depended on how the judges felt about the tusk-head issue.

I was rejected by boyfriends, would-be boyfriends, employers who didn’t hire me. I was even rejected by my first choice of college.

I hope they all know by now what a drastic mistake they made.

So here’s the truth: I was never picked first for a sports team; I was not the smartest kid in the class; I never won a spelling bee or (as I confessed earlier) a beauty contest; I didn’t even win a contest where a random name was pulled out of a hat for a prize. The random name was never mine.

Here’s a bit of good news: I was never rejected by a selective club. That’s because I never applied, following Groucho Marx’s classic advice that he would refuse to join any club that would have him as a member.

Learn from the experience is what they say in advice columns about rejection–presumably written by people pretending they have never been rejected in their lives. I suppose one could and, in fact, should learn. But I have to say it is easier to use the double S solution: snack and shop your way out of humiliation.

If there were a club for people who had ever been rejected, everybody could join. Maybe the selection criterion to keep the numbers manageable would be limited to those whose rejection was more painful, more humiliating, and, most importantly, less deserved. But then, those who didn’t make it into the club would be, you got it, rejected.

So here’s to you, narwhal. I hope that the insurance company wises up and hires you, but if you don’t get that gig, just know this: there is a little in narwhal in all of us. You have a lot of company.