Creative people, take heart. Restrain your self-pity. You don’t have a choice. How else would you live? If you could conform, you already would have. Keep your eyes glistening and your intelligence white-hot (as Rumi advises). Nurture yourself with relations with like minded people, beware the impulse for self-medication, cultivate elders who have cut trail in front of you, mentor those coming behind you, and grow what the Mohawks call “seven thicknesses of skin” because you are going to need it. This is the way it has always been.

–Anonymous, from a letter to Cary Tennis at Salon

Thanks to Kate for pointing this out.