The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
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Hi, time travelling me! Long time no see, 17 years I think?
So yeah, I was in the same situation, almost exactly. Well, not the psychiatry and therapy and medication; I had self-diagnosed myself with depression instead. I lived with my mother, flunked out of college twice (through not showing up), worked a minimum wage job. I was very afraid to tell my mother when I flunked out the second time. I don't know exactly why, but I'm pretty sure it's not ADHD. I just don't learn well in a classroom environment. It bores me, to litteral sleep. I learn almost exclusively through exploration and experimentation. I can certainly concentrate for long period of times when I'm learning that way.
So I went with your option 2 (except for the therapy, psychiatry and medication). Told my mother. Obviously she was angry and worried that there would be no doors open to me without a degree. I went searching for a job with what I had (high school diploma and unfinished college degrees). It took me a week. I managed to impress a recruiter in a test enough that she recommended me for a job as helpdesk for a major law firm. I was self-taught IT tech (tech runs in the family) and my first unfinished degree was in desktop publishing, which had trained me to use Microsoft Office to a very high level of proficiency. Turns out not too many people have the skillset to support legal secretaries in their work. A year later I moved out of my mother's place. My career was built from that job and the contacts I made there, I've never been without work since then. I'm now working for a consulting firm, selling my services to clients who need a senior sysadmin.
Anyway, I can't say for sure things will work out the same for you. Maybe I was lucky to be at the right place at the right time with the right skillset. I can't even say that not having a college degree made anything more difficult, I guess I'm probably never going to be considered for a job in government or education, but outside of that, it just isn't that much of a factor in IT once you have experience. But I guess what I can say is that as long as you have marketable skills, and can find a way to bypass HR filters (networking, going through recruiters, pitching yourself directly to the people you would be working under), college is not mandatory for a succesful professional life.
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