Congratulations, you are smart enough, and literate enough, to learn software engineering. Meanwhile the average American reads at a 5th grade level, and aroun

Congratulations, you are smart enough, and literate enough, to learn software engineering. Meanwhile the average American reads at a 5th grade level, and around 20% of Americans are functionally illiterate. I'm guessing you also didn't have any chronic health conditions. Traumatic brain injury that keeps you from remembering things, or a form of PTSD that causes you to be unable to function in loud environments. A lot of us in the technology field started off with very little and fought our way up to having something. Those of us with empathy realize it was a combination of hard work and a lot of other things going right as well that we didn't have control over.