Read the biographies of people you admire. The parts they struggled with are always longer than the movie shows.

Stories about successful people get compressed, because ten years of uncertainty makes for a slow scene. What gets cut is the part you would actually recognise: the rejections, the money problems, the stretch where nothing worked and nobody was interested. Reading the long version makes your own slow patch look ordinary rather than disqualifying.

Pick one person whose work you admire and read something longer than an interview. Pay attention to what they were doing at your age. It is usually less impressive than you imagined.