What the decision actually tells you

A rejection is a decision about a file, taken in a few minutes, against a number of places and a set of priorities you were never shown. Those priorities move year to year. A department that took forty students last year may be taking twenty-five this year, or may be balancing a cohort in a way that has nothing to do with any individual application.

So the honest reading is narrow: this file did not fit this course this year. It is not evidence about your ability and it is not a forecast. That is worth stating plainly, because the opposite belief — that the decision measured you — is what stops people applying again, and reapplying is frequently the thing that works.