It's hard to know how applicable my experiences are to your situation, but here are some things that I figured out (after a lot of time and frustration) that proved effective.

Grad school, for many people, seems inevitably to entail some prolonged dark night of the soul. Accept this as part of the process. It can cause you to lose yourself and your connection to what you really care about... or you can use it to strengthen these things. But you have to do that yourself. Don't expect anyone to help you. Models like "a community of teachers and learners" or "a thriving research environment" can lead to serious depression when they don't deliver. A better model is something like "an odyssey of solitude to test you".

I naively assumed that grad school would be an extrapolation of undergrad: I would be continuing my education by going deeply into a particular field. That was a big mistake. Eventually I realized it had nothing to do with education or even particularly with ideas. It was job training for becoming an academic. The real subject matter was: how to get an article published, how to fill out a grant application, how to give a talk at a conference. (Edit: oh, and how could I forget: how to pay as little attention to your teaching as possible.) As for learning the field, you were expected to know it all already and fill in any gaps on your own (we were handed a list of 500 books to read). I thought this was stupid and rebelled against the system in all kinds of ways that didn't help. Eventually I accepted that it is what it is, and turned my attention to what I wanted. Instead of changing the context, I figured out how to use it for my own purposes. It was hard to let go of my expectations - particularly to stop expecting mentorship or guidance from teachers. But doing so led to a lot of good things.

I divided my work into two categories: what I had to do to "feed the animal" (busywork and formal requirements) and what was meaningful to me. The strategy was to minimize the former (not eliminate it - don't fight the beast, petting works better) and maximize the latter. This worked well. Ironically, a lot of the praise and mentorship I had been craving started raining down on me once I no longer needed it.

Once one figures out how to feed the animal (in your case that sounds pretty easy), a graduate stipend can be a great basis for doing whatever you want. In my case, I used the last year of my fellowship to get back into programming. That was because I figured out I didn't want to stay in the field I was in; I had gotten what I needed out of it, and an academic job in that field would have been a waste. On the other hand, if I had had a passion for that field, I would have used my stipend to do work that I cared about, whether or not it was related to my official responsibilities. Not that I would have abrogated my responsibilities (that's the feeding the animal part) - just minimized them. If someone had asked me, "Why are you doing this other stuff" I would have said "That's my side project" or something like that. I also would have reached out to other people in the field, perhaps by sending them drafts of papers and so on. The point is that I would have done all this on my own and built up my own network of relationships.

This is a long comment that I could easily make longer! In any case, good luck.

Edit: ok, one more thing. It can be really useful to find a kindred spirit or two at your institution. They don't have to be in the same field. I would go exploring a little if I were you.