{∅, {∅}, {∅, {∅}}} : Rage Against the Meat Grinder

Yes,something similar happened to me around the same age.My parents fought a great deal and came close to getting a divorce but ultimately did not.
I imagine that Mr.Ed Chu,your classmate, is working with a Corporation now, probably making a great deal of money( do you happen to know what he is doing?).Sure,he might have done better than you at a particular point of time.i

But you see there are some initial successes which lead to the ultimate failure and some initial failures which lead to the ultimate success.

I am sure you know that India produces more engineers than any other country in the world and it is just a sheer anomaly that my father forced me into a program that I hated. I could have easily been sent to an engineering school and might have ended up as “one of the techies”. I might have gotten married.Sired a kid or two.

Instead I was thrown into a furnace of pain and anguish, I began to question everything, every single thing, no school of philosophy could have been better than that.To paraphrase Schopenhauer sometimes what it takes is  extreme suffering, to see the truth and no amount of knowledge could substitute it.

If one forced to run a long race, then is better, as Sea Biscuit, shows us,to pace one self and not to expend all the  energy at once in the first lap.

Also, what you have done is , you have broken the mold and as Thomas Kahn says, those who do that are in for a rough ride but eventually they emerge from the ashes, like Phoenix.

It has only been a couple of centuries that a mathematician or philosopher is supposed to be with an institution. We belong to the lineage of Diogenes, not Plato. That is our fate. Not everything is bad about such a fate. The freedom Diogenes possessed Plato never had.

We may not have the support of an Academy, but we do have freedom of thought, which matters a great deal more.
We might just have a dog and a broken bowl but we bow to no king, to no emperor.A few years back, there was a boss of mine, who wrote really cheap poetry and as he did not know how to even start the computer, so he asked me to set up a blog for him,which I did in my personal time.

I even did all the work to get his book published on Amazon( he back-stabbed me after all that,but that's another story). He ,one day said, that he was about to retire and hopes that his blogs gets really popular before that so that he could start minting money from it after retirement.

Quite innocently and without any malice I blurted out that,generally speaking, the work of any author gets recognised well after he is dead and buried, if then. The bastard went ballistic and I immediately back-tracked and said that it might happen within 10 years too.
Even that was not good enough for him, so I said ,some might make it in 2 or 3 years only.Then was he pacified.

What I am saying is ,we here , are not bothered about  making it. Ever.

Get well soon.