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This is a much more substantive comment than mine, thanks for sharing your experience. In your case, what brought you from the situation you were in before to

• formersquatter 5y ago
  If you guessed "programming" ... I had one "normal" parent, in the sense of having a home and a stable job, living in a decent community. I was just persona-non-grata in that household by middle school age, as there were some issues with an abusive live-in-boyfriend of my mothers. So I had a stable schooling, and if I needed something like a TI-83 for school I would be furnished it. I wasn't truly destitute, but at the same time had an unstable living arrangement and frequently had to be used as some sort of sympathy bait in the second-hand bread line. I befriended a student fiddling with a hex editor and a NES ROM in a typing class and that was a bridge into programming for me. Got into a mess of languages and systems (Java, PHP, Javascript, graphic design, etc.) Met some more classmates that were of good means, and of similar interests and so I just sort-of aped their bleeding-edge interests, whether it was PHP, Web 2.0 CSS / jQuery wizardry, or general systems administration. Following high school, I landed a job out of high school as an intern programmer for $10 / hour on a 1099, getting some number of promotions and raises to $75K full-time with benefits with a little over two years. From there, I'm pretty much just any other programmer. I told my father if he ever wanted to get his shit together, to reach out and we'd figure it out... but that has never happened. I have some contacts that through their daily lives end up keeping tabs on him, he still scrapes by living his itinerant life.