I've given up on searching for a job outside our home business. Even dishwashing is apparently too high an aspiration for me. Georgia has a 9.2% unemployment rate at the moment, so I guess it's only partially my fault that I've never held an actual job.
For a year and a half I've been making cold-calls and trying to approach managers, but it seems to be a Sisyphean task because I am in competition with hordes of other applicants who have an insurmountable edge over me: years of friendships built up in the local community. People who can act as references and point to vacancies as soon as they open up (providing the managers assurance that they are hiring a swell guy/girl). I on the other hand don't know anyone here besides my dad.
I regret not insisting on going to summer camps when I was younger, at least then I could have made friends that might have led to other connections that would have led to getting a job and perhaps even finding girlfriends later on. But my dad insisted that I was getting all the exposure I needed sitting around with him all day while he plugged away on eBay selling things. Every day I would go outside to be tortured in sports.
And yet somehow I think I deserved that misery because I wasn't grateful enough for the first eight years of my life.
Recently I've been looking into web development as a career. I have no prior web dev experience and only a semester-long introduction to coding (C). I've mostly been reading up on HTML and CSS. It is my understanding that those are the two basic building blocks of web development, from which other languages like AJAX and PHP are learned. And if I can pull off freelancing, then I can set my own hours.
As for moving...I see my current college career ending in one of a few ways.
1) I get accepted into Georgia Tech. I take a few semesters there, panic when I realize I cannot pay for it because my financial aid won't be enough, then be forced to drop out. After that I won't be able to find a job in Georgia, which is something I have come to accept, so if I am unable to move out then I will have no choice but to wither away and die here.
2) I don't get accepted into Georgia Tech. I stay in Southern Polytechnic for perhaps a semester, get bored out of my mind and take up self-harm again, then jump in front of a train.
3) I don't get accepted into Georgia Tech. I tell my dad that I am interested in studying web development. By this point I will have a couple of months of studying that under my belt. I proposed the idea of getting out of college to him before but he wouldn't have it because then I would have been "aimless", he said. But that was before I took up studying web development. Now I am hoping to convince him that I can study something that I actually want to study and have that be a replacement for a university.
To be perfectly honest, I am most attracted to #3. I might even be able to move out then. There's a few thousand dollars of loans to pay off but I suppose that is better than the tens of thousands of dollars a lot of other students take out.