Do You Handle Rejection Well?

I stumbled across this news story last night on ABC News and it completely floored me. A 26-year-old barber tried to pay someone to kill her ex and his daughter.

Can you believe that?

The ex-boyfriend, a 53-year-old cop, and his 19-year-old daughter. As if breaking his heart wasn’t enough, she wanted to break everything else too — and do the same to his kid.

You know how you say “I’m gonna kill him” after an argument?

This Jaclyn actually took it literally. I can’t believe she has the same name as my cousin. It reminds me of when my ex left me and I thought I was going to die.

I was convinced I’d never breathe normally again.

But actually kill someone?

Damn, I didn’t even wish harm on his ex’s potato face that kept showing up in photos.

The relationship ended on March 6, and she was already giving a $500 down payment to some guy on Tinder to do the job. The total price? $12,000 to take out the man and his daughter.

This is for real. She didn’t even need a month to go from “it’s over” to “let’s end it all.”

I talked about this with my mom last night, and she immediately said, “Well, these are people with something wrong inside them.” But I don’t know if it’s that simple. I’ve had my heart so broken that I threw up for three days straight. I locked myself away. I cried until my face burned. We all die a little when we’re rejected, don’t we?

But there are lines you don’t cross.

And it makes me wonder: what happens in someone’s head to reach this point? She didn’t just want to get rid of the guy, she wanted to take out his daughter too.

A young woman who was probably just living her life.

Maybe she didn’t even like her dad’s relationship.

I was talking about this with Anabela at lunch and noticed something strange. Anabela is obsessed with her ex. They’ve been separated for two years, and she still keeps a list of his flaws in a little notebook. Not that that’s normal, but it showed me that we all have weird ways of dealing with endings.

The part that choked me up the most was the Tinder thing.

That this woman used a dating app to find someone who’d murder people. That’s the world we live in now? People are out here swiping right on assassins?

He was posing as a hitman and immediately turned her in, thank God. Otherwise we’d be reading about a double homicide instead of a failed plot. But what if he wasn’t? What if he’d taken the money and carried it out?

That poor girl. She didn’t ask for any of this. She was just collateral damage in someone else’s heartbreak.

And maybe that’s the most terrifying part — when someone decides their hurt is bigger than your right to exist.

It makes you think about the importance of mental health and emotional regulation. About what happens when someone doesn’t have the tools to process pain. About the importance of asking for help before you spiral into something irreversible.

We’ve all been rejected. Some of us get ghosted. Some get blocked. Some of us are left with no explanation at all. It hurts. It feels like death, sometimes. But it’s not.

Rejection is a human experience, not a death sentence. It doesn’t have to make you bitter. It doesn’t have to break your brain. It doesn’t have to turn you into a person capable of unimaginable things.

I think about all the times I thought I wouldn’t make it through the pain, but I did.

We always do — as long as we let ourselves feel the hurt instead of trying to destroy it.

If there’s one thing this story taught me, it’s this: heartbreak isn’t an excuse for harm. Not to others. Not even to yourself.

Get help. Talk to someone. Journal it. Cry it out. Take a walk. Scream into a pillow. But don’t let rejection turn you into someone unrecognizable.

Because love ends — but your humanity doesn’t have to.