A no from them isn’t a verdict on you. It’s a mismatch.

Every decision to pass gets made inside somebody else’s constraints: what they need this year, who they already have, a budget, a taste, ten distracted minutes on a Tuesday afternoon. Very little of that is a measurement of you. It arrives feeling like one because you were the only person in the room when you read it.

Ask what specifically did not fit, if an answer is available. Then send the next one within the week, before the no has time to harden into a story about your ceiling. Mismatches are common, and they land personally even when they are not.