They turned down a story about her

A woman in Abu Dhabi draws greeting cards by hand and sells them online. She sent a set to a gift shop in a mall, with a careful note, and a fortnight later received a two-line reply. Not for them, thank you.

She took it as a verdict on her work, and on her. That is how a no usually feels.

But the buyer at that shop has never met her. The buyer looked at a parcel, a website and a name they did not recognise, and put together a quick picture: an unknown maker, untested, perhaps hard to reorder from, perhaps unable to cope with a busy season. That picture mixed with the buyer's own worries about shelf space and what sold last year. The no was a judgement on the picture. It could not have been about her, because she was never in the room.

Then she does the same thing from the other side. Local makers never get into the malls. Buyers only want names they already know. Her style is too quiet. Each of those is a story too, built from one short email, and each time she tells it, to a friend or to herself, it gets sharper and feels more like simply how things are.

None of us meets things as they really are. We meet them through what we already believe, and we keep adding to that belief, rehearsing it until it passes for fact.

That sounds bleak, but it hands her something. If the story is hers, it can be rewritten. Not by pretending the no did not happen, but by choosing a version that leads somewhere: that the buyer needed more reasons to trust a name they did not know, and that she can supply them.

It is harder work than holding on to the first story. It is also the only part of this that is hers to change.