As the other answers say, you will need something specific to drive at. The field of software engineering is vast. You'll be repeatedly overwhelmed by its size and scope without getting anywhere unless you start, and develop skills on the way. Phrased differently, you don't know what you don't know. By far the best way to explore what you want to do and to gain the skills necessary is to do it on someone else's dime. Get a job.

Easiest way into a tech company in a technical role is through front end. (Let's kill a myth here: not because FE is easier—it's not, necessarily. But the risk is generally lower, since it's hard to really screw things up in javascript and your mistakes will usually be more traceable for others to clean up after you than they would be in, e.g., devops.) Give yourself 3 months to learn everything you can to pass an interview in javascript, html, and css. Then go to a non-silicon valley town with lots of tech (Austin, Boston, Chicago, LA come to mind) and go out for every front end job you can find in a mid size company.

If the company's too big, you'll get locked in the front end role without opportunities to explore other things. If it's too small, you risk (a) that it's the founder's lifestyle business without any real innovation, or (b) that it will grow so fast that you'll have responsibility piled on you and no time to learn. (I recently interviewed a guy like this. Super smart, but he joined a high-growth startup as a cheap early employee, and his expertise stayed unfortunately narrow because he had no time to grow, only to prop up his part of the system.) You're looking for a place with 30-70 engineers, whose senior technical people are over age 45.