You are not your writing. You are worthwhile whether or not you ever sell a thing, and your life has more to it than the words you write.I think this is true for any endeavor we care deeply about, actually, and not just for writing.Don’t hang your self-worth on the news you find in your mailbox or the quality of the words you write on a given day. That way lies madness, or at least depression.
Write as well as you can. Throw your whole soul into your writing. But build a life outside of your writing, too. Remember that you exist outside of it.
This is harder than it seems. You will forget regularly, and need to remind yourself.
Do it anyway.
And I think it is hard. I think if we care about something we’re doing, we throw everything we have into it, and need to. And yet in the end, we have to find ways to also remember our lives have meaning whether or not on a given day these things we care about so much are going well or poorly or somewhere in between.