6 ideas
Instead of asking outside critics whether your work is good, ask yourself in your quietest hour whether you would die if you were forbidden to write. If the honest answer is a plain 'I must,' build your whole life around that need so that even its smallest, most ordinary hours become a sign of it. External validation can't settle whether a calling is real; only an inward need you can't give up can.
Works of art are endlessly solitary, and criticism is the least able of all approaches to reach them. Only love can grasp and hold them and judge them fairly. Rilke tells the young poet to trust his own feeling against every argument, discussion, or introduction, because asking reviewers for approval turns the artist's attention outward, where no real answer can be found.
Be patient with what is unresolved in your heart, and love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a foreign tongue. Don't search for answers you can't yet live, because you couldn't hold them anyway. If you live the questions now, you may slowly grow, some distant day and without noticing, into the answer.
Being an artist means growing the way a tree does, which doesn't force its sap and stands calmly through spring storms without fearing that summer won't come. Time isn't a measure here; ten years are nothing. Summer comes only to those who are patient, and the artist must endure the stretches where nothing seems to happen, because that is when the real gestation takes place.
Solitude isn't a problem to cure. It is the basic condition of the inner life, and people run from it into easy social convention because it is difficult. The more solitary you are, the more a love like one for distant stars becomes possible: a love of two solitudes that protect, border, and greet each other rather than merge.
Great sadnesses are moments when something new has entered us, and they pass through us like a guest. We should meet them quietly and attentively rather than rush to escape through distraction. A sadness endured in solitude becomes part of who we are and changes us from within. Treating our dragons as princesses waiting to see us act bravely turns what frightens us into something that needs our help.