Thanks for sharing your story. I'm really tired rn so please forgive any nonsense I may write lol. I have had some similar experiences in my life (but I rarely have access to legit monoaminergic stims so mainly caffeine or whatever research chems I can find lol) where I just feel compelled to hack on something for days/weeks at a time to the detriment of the rest of my life/health. That is really cool though that you made significant money (enough to help pay tuition) and got some cred to get a internship! Particularly to me cuz I have both of those problems too lol. The comments here have convinced me to try the bug bounty thing out. I've been working with operating systems, compilers, etc for years so hopefully it won't be too hard for me to move from thinking about exploit mitigation to the other side. Some of those wild techniques people use these days to, for example, subvert the usual control flow of programs seems like dark magic to me though lmao. Mostly gone are the days when you could just dump your return addresses on to someone else's stack and expect to have easy control or whatever :3 People think writing C is like walking across a minefield but it is actually really hard to turn these oversights/mistakes (particularly in memory management) into actual working exploitable security flaws because of all these nice mitigations we have in place now.

I'm actually finally getting assessed for ADHD soon after having doctors dismiss my concerns for years so maybe I'll get some meds for that idk lol. I'm glad you found a more sustainable way to help with your ADHD and depression.