Thanks for sharing. My story is very similar to yours but I am in the middle of it still at age 28. I've been at this since I was 11 as well when my older brother taught me about HTML, Dreamweaver, Visual Basic, OOP. The ABCs of this industry as we know it today.
I dropped out of college at 20. Worked a few jobs in cafes and then in sales and finally as a technician. First technician job was fixing ATM machines, second was building high-end gaming computers for an Amazon merchant.
I studied FreeCodeCamp after work and got into a coding bootcamp that I thought would help me get into the industry. I moved to Utah and got kicked out of it midway through for smoking weed. I lived out of AirBnb for a month and a half before getting a job on my own at startup. The school gave me a refund though because I guess they felt bad for me and wanted to help. Good on them, still grateful for that.
That job was for an MLM startup and I had to leave because it was not a good dev environment. I got hired by Bluehost and I learned all about DNS, email, popular CMSs, SEO, and all kinds of problems that everyday non-tech people run into with computers and with the Internet. It was a great learning opportunity for me. Then they laid me off along with 900 other people...they were bought out and this was common procedure for their acquisitions. I did not know that when they hired me :/
I decided to start my own agency/consultancy since I had a few friends who needed sites made. It's been miraculous how each of them always sends me new work through their network. Now I have a pipeline of clients always coming in and I just have to keep shipping work every day and money will keep coming in. :)
I've started working on ideas that I've drawn out and lost sleep over with some friends of mine who are engineers and investors. Maybe I can start a 2nd income stream too and eventually buy some real estate too!