I have been an ER/Critical Care nurse for the past 15 years. I went to nursing school right out of high school, because it was "a good steady job and you can help people." I administered narcotics to a patient before I could drink legally.
I had always wanted to be an engineer, but I believed people that told me I wasn't smart enough.
I remember writing QBasic when I was 9 years old. I begged my father for a modem for our computer for two full years. And, finally, when I was 14, he got me a 2400 baud Hayes smartmodem. After weeks of mucking about with the configuration and connection settings, I was at long last able to connect to my first BBS. I thought I was in heaven.
I mucked around a bit on that BBS for an hour or so, only to have my father try and make a phone call while the modem was connected. That's when it all came crashing down. He was furious and forbade me from ever using the modem again. I still don't know why it upset him so much. I think it had something to do with the movie War Games that had come out a few years earlier. I think Dad was scared I was going to hack into NORAD or something.
So, for years, I gave up on computers. I'd day-dream about being an engineer, only to have people around me tell me I'd regret it, that I would hate it, that I was too much of a "people person" and that my life would be a complete waste if I spent it in front of a computer screen.
But, when I was 30, I finally decided to get back in touch with my inner geek. I went back to school two classes a semester for 5 years. My work schedule as a nurse constantly changed from nights, to days, to evenings, to weekends, which forced me to go to school online. I kept plugging away at it and after 5 long years, I finished the engineering program at the University of Maryland this past May. I still have some General Ed. credits to take, but I finally finished the classes I'd need for their CMIS/software engineering degree.
This June I started to pick up web development and Django. For several months, I thought I really sucked at, and I thought it all might have been a huge mistake, because I could never get things to work right with Django. It wasn't until 3 months later, when I went to DjangoCon, that I learned that the release of Django that I had been working with for 3 months had been broken in the lead-up to the 1.0 release.
Eight weeks ago, I cut down to part-time at work, so I could focus on boot-strapping startups. If all goes well, I plan to release my first web app in a couple of weeks. My plan is to keep bootstrapping startup after startup until something takes off.
It's been a long, hard road, and I still have a long, long way to go and a lot to learn. I've thought many times that I wasn't smart enough, or too old. Things never really go according to plan. I get discouraged and frustrated a bunch. But, the only thing that can really stop me from chasing my dreams is my deciding to give them up for dead.