This is probably going to be different from other posts, but I really don't know where to talk and maybe someone here could give me advice.

10 years ago, when I was 12, I had been very motivated and confident tinkering around with computers, Linux and programming alike. I made my own software tools and had lots of projects. I had learned some Python and moved on to C and further into the UNIX circles, which is where issues started to arise.

I joined some online communities for programming and was active for some time, but when I asked questions, I quite frequently got told off to read some documentation and manuals. To be fair, there were things I missed and didn't notice out of pure mistake, but there were times it was really difficult to look for or understand the documentation.

One day, I asked a question and a moderator called me a "moron" because my question was apparently too insignificant for them, and doxxed me in the public forum, and the most active people were in on it. They even tried to contact my family. I tried to report their actions to other moderators, but no-one seemed to care. These people seem very robotic, like in StackOverflow. It would have been easy for me not to take it personally, but I was young and impressionable, and these were the only people I had with regard to programming.

Since then, I avoided the communities, and slowly began to lose motivation with programming and with more advanced aspects of computers. I was still programming on and off but not with as much enthusiasm.

Fast forward to when I was 18, there was male-only conscription in my country which affected my mental health severely, and I was suicidal and had an identity crisis, but that's another can of worms. At this point, I stopped programming and kept working in bad or low-paying jobs.

I grew up relatively poor, and have been poor. I can't afford a new good computer myself, so I have been trying to get my old one working by optimising it which forces me to delve into more advanced aspects of computing (e.g. optimising Linux). So, I want to study software development so hopefully I can get a job I am treated well and paid decently. But I just can't get back to it, it's so frustrating.

When studying to get back to programming, I feel like my brain isn't able to retain information, or at least I'm not confident it can. I still remember those people online. I just don't feel confident in myself at all, because I don't know if I could be missing some important details in what I am reading or memorising, so it takes me so long to try and get every essence of what I am studying. I feel I have to be self-reliant because I just cannot be treated like that again.

I am so frustrated and I want to get out of this limbo. What can I do?