My mom still wants me to finish a degree someday, but at almost 32 years old my work experience is worth a lot more, and I'm pretty sure any company that wouldn't hire me due to lack of a degree is not a place I'd be very happy at anyway.
My mom still wants me to finish a degree someday, but at almost 32 years old my work experience is worth a lot more, and I'm pretty sure any company that wouldn't hire me due to lack of a degree is not a place I'd be very happy at anyway.
Though the crowd might make you uncomfortable, you can take solace in the fact that you need not connect with all of them. Friends, or close friends, are mostly in single digit for most people.
> I also have severe depression and OCD which prevents me from getting things done.
Letting the mind wander isn't a bad thing, provided you get some stuff done as well. Plan for small tasks which you can get done. Are you familiar with lexers and parser? Implement an infix(a+b) to postfix(ab+) converter, where `a+b` can be an arbitrarily complex expression. Learning Python? Build a web app which takes a movie name as an input(use any web framework), searches twitter for mentions(use urlliib2 or equivalent), classifies tweets as negative/positivie(simple bayes classifier or use a library) and assigns a rating to the movie.
These are just examples. Getting things done makes you feel good and can help you counter the "disappointment" you mention.
Right now they're just feeding off each other. A big part of depression is feeling like you have no control over what's happening in your life. The OCD might be a way you're trying to feel like you have control over something again, even if it's just the formatting of your documents or when you wake up. Then when you can't achieve that you feel even more out of control and more depressed and the cycle is just going keep getting tighter.
I cannot recommend strongly enough that you go see someone and get this looked into. I know it's scary, I know it might feel like it's too hard or like it's pointless, but just do it. It took my mom actually showing up and physically taking me to the doctor before I started to get help, and by then school was ruined for me, and so was my credit. I had declare bankruptcy a few years later to shed the debt that I had run up while I was too depressed to make myself pay bills. Not the best way to start your mid-twenties.
You owe it to yourself to get this fixed.
I actually adored high school. There were 330 people in my graduating class. I graduated third, only a sliver of GPA away from salutatorian. There were 6 National Merit Finalists in my class (including myself) and one of the things that always drove me to excel in high school was the sense of competition with my very intelligent peers, along with the support of some amazing teachers who actually cared about us and would be actively disappointed when one of us didn't live up to our potential. Many of my advanced classes in high school were very small. We had 12 people in our AP Chem class.
Then I got to college and I was just another number. I lost my peer support group and any meaningful feedback on my work from my instructors and with it, my motivation.
Until that point in my life, I'd always had my sense of self and identity tangled up with academic achievement. I was a "smart kid". Doing poorly in college didn't just feel like a failure to get a particular grade, it made me feel like I was a failure as a person.
It took me years to get over that. In fact, I'm not 100% sure I am completely over it. But at least I don't let it consume me anymore.
You're more than your grades, you're more than college. There is so. much. more. to any single person than a single facet. If you think you'd do better in a smaller school, try to transfer before it's too late. Or if you decide that college isn't for you, don't beat yourself up about it. You can still well, especially in technical fields where skill is more important than a sheet of paper.
And get help for the depression, if you aren't already. I spent about a year on Effexor (and Ambien for the crippling insomnia that piggybacked onto my depression - it was terrible, I used to get auditory hallucinations of alarms clocks and phones ringing in the distance) and it truly made the difference. True clinical depression is a chemical blackhole in your own mind, and the drugs can give you the foothold you need to find your way back out of it.
My dad used to push me to get a degree. Now that I have a job he's cool about it. I still think he'd be happy if I finished college, but I prefer working on my music career in my spare time, which might not lead anywhere but is deeply satisfying.
I'm still somewhat bitter about dropping out. I don't particularly enjoyed school, as I always thought it kept me from learning the stuff I really cared about. But in retrospect I have to admit that I got exposed to a lot of stuff I might not have ever heard of elsewhere (like telecommunications engineering, Cisco administration, theoretical mathematics, and so on). Not that I learned much of of any of those, but I feel more rounded overall because of it.