Please take this piece of advice from a 30yo me who "failed" the same way you are. Scroll down if you just want an advice and don't care to read my story. ↓↓↓
Just in case I started having fun in computer-related stuff more than 15 years ago and finished my first paid freelance project around the same time. Unfortunately I didn't get any education for the similar reasons and until this day haven't been to a single job interview.
And my interests changed dramatically over decade and half and I jumped from some terrible arbitrage / SEO (back in 2006) to cybersecurity, then to making attempts to run my own business and then back freelance programming. Also went through PHP -> C++ -> Java with tons of other skills in between. Without ever doing proper full time or offline team work it's extremely hard to estimate my skills against what people have on market.
At the same time I never ever felt lack in options or possibilities to earn money. For me as freelancer it's was always just me against my lazyness. My last amazing one-year-long single man project that paid me well and let me dip my toes into world of Java. Now after half a year of downtime I started to look into Kotlin as well as Ethereum-based projects and Web3 which have a lot of opportunities.
I never stuggled financially for a long periods of time, but not having stable source of income is obviously feels like a problem at my age. While I have a wish to try having "proper job" sometimes it's still as scary for me as it's for you. And yeah I'm planning to find and try some interesting full-time job in team at some point this or next year.
...
So the advice is: you never really failed until you decide to give up and do nothing. There is abundance of opportunities to learn, earn money and work on interesting projects. Not all of them require you to have tons of full-time job experience and able to pass complicated interviews.
And if you really need this job. I know plenty of people who find their first job as frontend developers after learning basics just for a 3-4 months. They just hated their previous jobs and put a lot of effort in this short periods of time. It's not like being fancy ML expert or software engineer at FAANG, but it's a job and it will pay your bills.
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Please take this piece of advice from a 30yo me who "failed" the same way you are. Scroll down if you just want an advice and don't care to read my story. ↓↓↓
Just in case I started having fun in computer-related stuff more than 15 years ago and finished my first paid freelance project around the same time. Unfortunately I didn't get any education for the similar reasons and until this day haven't been to a single job interview.
And my interests changed dramatically over decade and half and I jumped from some terrible arbitrage / SEO (back in 2006) to cybersecurity, then to making attempts to run my own business and then back freelance programming. Also went through PHP -> C++ -> Java with tons of other skills in between. Without ever doing proper full time or offline team work it's extremely hard to estimate my skills against what people have on market.
At the same time I never ever felt lack in options or possibilities to earn money. For me as freelancer it's was always just me against my lazyness. My last amazing one-year-long single man project that paid me well and let me dip my toes into world of Java. Now after half a year of downtime I started to look into Kotlin as well as Ethereum-based projects and Web3 which have a lot of opportunities.
I never stuggled financially for a long periods of time, but not having stable source of income is obviously feels like a problem at my age. While I have a wish to try having "proper job" sometimes it's still as scary for me as it's for you. And yeah I'm planning to find and try some interesting full-time job in team at some point this or next year.
...
So the advice is: you never really failed until you decide to give up and do nothing. There is abundance of opportunities to learn, earn money and work on interesting projects. Not all of them require you to have tons of full-time job experience and able to pass complicated interviews.
And if you really need this job. I know plenty of people who find their first job as frontend developers after learning basics just for a 3-4 months. They just hated their previous jobs and put a lot of effort in this short periods of time. It's not like being fancy ML expert or software engineer at FAANG, but it's a job and it will pay your bills.