I am one of those funny little people who is creative and has made the dubious decision to try to make a career out of it.

I didn’t fully commit until I was around 30, and I’ve spent the last 14 years in an up and down ride, trying to chip away until I reach the mysterious and elusive level of success where nothing bad happens ever.

I have had more heartening bits than many aspiring writers, but they have never coalesced into any kind of stability. Somewhere in the distance is the dream: I get to make my own TV show or movie, and everything finally falls into place and I never struggle or doubt myself again. The vague-but-strengthening-with-each-passing-day sense that I’ve made a terrible mistake that is too late to fix will vanish.

One of the things I have done to keep my head above water is collect stories about people who have achieved that kind of success later in life. Morgan Freeman was 52 before his breakthrough role in Driving Miss Daisy. Charles Bukowski was 49 when he quit his job to write full time. Yesterday a guy I follow on social media posted that a movie he co-wrote was about to start shooting, a first for him – and he is 43.

There are many artists who quietly beaver away (not all of them lesbians like me) for half their life or more until they finally get their “breakthrough”. When you’re younger than them, a late bloomer is a huge reassurance. It’s proof that even if it hasn’t worked out for you yet, it still conceivably can. These are stories I’ve gathered like precious stones over the years, clutching them to my breast when my own creative life feels impossible to sustain, as my bones weary, and the cohort of people also trying to make a splash in dying industries get ever younger and more beautiful.

Earlier this month, there was a shiny new precious stone up for grabs when the genre-defying 76-year-old writer Anne Carson won the Nobel prize in literature. Carson was 42 when her first book of poems was published by a small Canadian publisher, and since then she has lectured and published consistently. Usually, this is a story I would pounce on with my greedy little fingers, and use it to comfort myself. I’m only 44, look how much time there is to get beloved!

For a few reasons, I didn’t have that same feeling this time. The most obvious one is that Carson was already so successful, respected, and well read. Another is that my ever-optimistic and very honest girlfriend has promised to break up with me if I give up on my dreams, which has shifted my perspective somewhat. And another was reading Carson’s own words about her artistic practice and attitude to success. She was once quoted as saying “I’m going to be famous 15 minutes after I’m dead.” After winning the MacArthur Fellowship in 2000, when asked what difference notoriety had made, she said, “Doesn’t make a lot of difference. It’s nice to be met at airports, I’ll say that.”

She went on to talk about how it meant she could make more work. That is the real success. Not that she won this or that award at her age, but that she has never stopped pushing herself; she has continued to make work of distinction, because that is what she’s here to do. I realised that my habit of hoarding these late-in-life success stories was doing a disservice to us all. I was placing recognition and milestones above the work, reducing someone else’s creative life down to their public victories. Carson’s career deserves more respect than that, and so does mine. I find it hard to say, but I am proud of the fact that I have come from almost nothing, with no connections, and have worked hard in a tough industry for over a decade to scrape together a living doing what I am here to do. I find it hard to accept, but that is worth recognition on its own. I’ve been treating this part of my life as a waiting room for victory, instead of the victory.

Don’t get me wrong, this is not an argument against wanting or striving for success. I would love to be given a huge creative opportunity that I can become very annoying about. I would LOVE for the creative industries to be supported to thrive so that many other annoying people can find their voice and get it heard. We shouldn’t have to choose between being who we are and being able to survive. It’s no good telling artists that the work itself should be its own reward when the rent still needs paying. Nor should we pretend that recognition, financial security and the chance to reach an audience don’t matter. They do. They really do.

But I’ve been reminded that outcomes are not everything. Your creative life will continue to change. It can take decades to hit the right thing on the right head at the right moment. It also may never happen. Carson (and my girlfriend) continue to remind me the point is to keep making things, to keep finding out what I think, to keep trying to inject my voice into the world. If I ever get a big break, it won’t be in the form of a Nobel prize, but I still hope for something. I can’t be dishonest about that. But whether or not it happens, I’ll still be here, chipping away at the dream until I fall into the big sleep.

• Rebecca Shaw is a writer based in Sydney