You undoubtedly know this, but you are not alone. I am having this constant existential crisis over the existence of time (social media is really good at proliferating this problem). You need to consider what is important to you and, I think, definitely read up on the experiences of writers before reaching 'success'. Stephen King wrote about it in his book and a lot of writers have blog posts about it. It's difficult because life is difficult and is always unfair to people that are trying to make a living doing what they love. Even if you have read it and think I'm just repeating everything you already know, it's good to go back and remind yourself (and treat yourself better because you don't deserve to be treated like that at all. You're a good person and you're working really hard). I think you need to stand back from it for a while and think about where you want to be and who you want to be. What is your realistic expectation of success and making money through writing? What kind of writer do you want to be? There are so many different paths to being published and supporting yourself by writing.
Have you heard of Rupi Kaur? She started out on Tumblr posting jpegs of her poems (you've probably seen them or ones with the same aesthetic - black text on white background typically written in times new roman) and self-published successfully thanks to her large social media following. A publishing house picked the book up and she's doing pretty well. When it comes to that kind of success, it depends a lot on your aesthetic. When people are reading poetry online, they typically want it to be easy and fast and clean. People will obviously deny that because they want to believe in the 'purity of art' or whatever, but that's the way it is. At this point, with the importance of social media, a poem is always considered more profound if it's black text on a white background preferably as a jpeg so that it can be saved and shared everywhere and people can say it's "relatable". That's another thing. To succeed on social media, people have to be able to empathize with your content (my mother would beat me to a pulp if she saw me calling a piece of writing 'content'. She's an old school journalist that really fights against the terminology of art as a product).
Maybe I sound like a huuuuuuuuuge pessimistic asshole. This is just how I've seen it work and what I've read about how it works. It's good to be honest. Success is difficult, but so is living. You do what you love and fuck the rest.
Have you heard of Rupi Kaur? She started out on Tumblr posting jpegs of her poems (you've probably seen them or ones with the same aesthetic - black text on white background typically written in times new roman) and self-published successfully thanks to her large social media following. A publishing house picked the book up and she's doing pretty well. When it comes to that kind of success, it depends a lot on your aesthetic. When people are reading poetry online, they typically want it to be easy and fast and clean. People will obviously deny that because they want to believe in the 'purity of art' or whatever, but that's the way it is. At this point, with the importance of social media, a poem is always considered more profound if it's black text on a white background preferably as a jpeg so that it can be saved and shared everywhere and people can say it's "relatable". That's another thing. To succeed on social media, people have to be able to empathize with your content (my mother would beat me to a pulp if she saw me calling a piece of writing 'content'. She's an old school journalist that really fights against the terminology of art as a product).
Maybe I sound like a huuuuuuuuuge pessimistic asshole. This is just how I've seen it work and what I've read about how it works. It's good to be honest. Success is difficult, but so is living. You do what you love and fuck the rest.