The best advice I can give you: don’t wait on someone else to see your worth.
For poets, none of this is new, but something : Don’t wait on that literary magazine or that press or that big figure of the poetry world to see you. Just don’t. Read. Write. Read more. Write more. Edit yourself. You aren’t going to “make it” just because you got into X journal or even if you were blessed with your first book to come out with OMFG Dream Press. You are not going to fail to ever get work somewhere just because some of your peers seem to be thriving while you feel like you’re drowning. See a therapist. Everyone needs a therapist, anyway, not just the obviously broken. Nobody nows how to keep themselves regulated at all times; disregulation and emotional wreckage is part of the general human experience. Breathe.
But at the end, don’t let the wait of disappointment shackle you to your grave. You are going to die some day, but every day of life is an opportunity to do something to make sure you did not just let the world keep you from trying to act. Success is never going to look exactly like you imagine in your head or in your diary.
It’s okay to desire being seen in “the big places,” to want the job with “the big company,” and it is not settling to take the job that pays your bills. Nobody said that has to be where you stop trying for the next step up. If you are a writer: write. If you are a singer: sing. Perform. When people give you the opportunity to present yourself to them, do it whether or not you believe why won’t like it, won’t accept it.
I tell my students this every semester, as I am wont for words of advice as a teacher, as someone who fancies he knows how to rise from poverty into something of a success: No matter who you think you are and how good you believe you are as a person, you have to treat each new stranger you meet and each new job you go for as an opportunity to introduce yourself and show your best self. You may know who you are to yourself and those who know you, but you always have to be aware of your stranger-ness to those who have never met you. Don’t fake who you are, but do make sure you try to show who you genuinely are when you meet a new teacher, a new peer, a new colleague, a new possible friend.