An Important Lesson
This seems obvious at first blush, but I think it's only just starting to sink in:
You can be talented, and work hard and well at something. You can push yourself to the point of emotional turmoil, actually crying with emotion at the words you are writing as you are writing them. You can take hours off of your day job, the thing that pays the bills, in a desperate attempts to codify in words the voices which haunt you and which will not shut up until you do so. You can, in short, be doing everything you feel like you are supposed to be doing, and you can come out the other side with a piece that makes you smile, or hurt, or whatever, exactly how you want it to. And even after all that, the vast majority of people are going to say "meh".
And that's okay.
You can be talented, and work hard and well at something. You can push yourself to the point of emotional turmoil, actually crying with emotion at the words you are writing as you are writing them. You can take hours off of your day job, the thing that pays the bills, in a desperate attempts to codify in words the voices which haunt you and which will not shut up until you do so. You can, in short, be doing everything you feel like you are supposed to be doing, and you can come out the other side with a piece that makes you smile, or hurt, or whatever, exactly how you want it to. And even after all that, the vast majority of people are going to say "meh".
And that's okay.