Hay, welcome to the forums, great question. So I see many people have replied I’m sure there is lots of great advice in there and a few condesending replies as well (just a guess) couldn’t be bothered reading them all.
I remember my early days of Eve and feeling the same, endlessly getting ganked by groups of people in insane ships that I couldn’t dream of affording. I’m an idiot so I kept persisting for years and had I once in a blue moon victory or close call which kept me going but mostly pain and dispare.
I only started making real progress when I joined a PvP corp, in my case a wormhole corp. There were people who showed my the ropes and could teach me the why of not doing something or why you might need to do that same thing in a different situation and of course friends to fly with.
As for not remaining salty after getting smashed, one of the ways I like to look at it is, there is always more that you can learn from a loss than from a win, often early days the lesson is you shouldn’t have been there in that situation, but that’s where all the shiny money is right?! For example I personally now am a wormhole Hunter, and kill many noob’s doing data/relic sites, (mostly for the killmark on my ships) but I will also do them myself if there seems to be no one around, the first thing is I have the system scanned out and normally have been watching as many of the wormhole as I can (I have two accounts) i do chores around the house and I’ll hear if someone jumps through a hole (like fishing). If the hole seems quite I’ll some times log in an alt that is trained into cov-ops and hacking and go run them. You can still do this with one toon just means you watch one hole. The point I’m trying to make is I avoid getting fisted now, and feeling that ■■■■ feeling, I know not everyone has the time for that but ya know tips and tricks…
Anyway hope that helps and the last piece of advice I will give you is to persist, once you have a good close fight where you beat the odds and overcome the deathsquad who has come for you or just take a bite out of them there is no feeling like it, this game is mental!!!
Good luck!