Has my childhood trauma ruined my chance to be a life long learner?

I put this in the vent/rant section because I feel like maybe I've said far too much and no one's actually going to want to answer the question portion. But we'll see.

I, 34f, did not have a good experience in high school.

At 14 years old I was taken into my sister's therapist office and given an IQ test. She got therapy because she was rebellious. Sneaking out of the house, stealing, drinking etc. I was very obedient but overweight. Yes, weight doesn't seem relevant to behavior but it will come full circle trust me.

My result was a 139 IQ, however I was remembering a joke on the TV show during one of the questions and probably should have been listening better, so I probably actually would have scored over 140 if I hadn't daydreamed for that moment. So for all intent and purposes there is proof there that I have/had the capacity to be intelligent.

Given that boost in motivation seemed helpful, except my therapist assumed I was either depressed or ADHD, via some push from my mother, and tried giving me pills. Remind you the pills were so I could use that IQ to my advantage, and get good grades. My mom liked the idea because it could help me lose weight. She blatantly stated that to me and that made me hate the idea of the medication to begin with.

So anyways, did the whole 4-year high School experience without any medications because I didn't like the way they made me feel in addition to my mom's comment.

My grades got worse every semester. I was so highly effected by the social aspects of high school to ever enjoy the learning portion.

Kids hated me, even though I didn't speak to them and just tried to stay away from them all as best I could. Looking back on it I guess the logic was that because I wore pajamas to school everyday and didn't want to be part of their cliques that I somehow was judging them or didn't like them. That wasn't true. It was never true. I never had any sort of hatred for any group of students for being too popular or whatever. But they saw me and they just assumed that and I can't know what is going on in people's heads unless they tell me.

I even had teachers who were mean to me because they just had assumptions about how I didn't want to be there and I was not worth their effort. And I would watch those same teachers be super nice to other students and it just killed me.

I had one or two confrontations that made it pretty clear that these assumptions from everyone were actually the issue but I didn't know how to solve it as a literal child. (More neurotypical people might argue that my inability to change so they would stop assuming those things could also have been the issue but how would I have known what to change to without being told)

I made it to my senior year, after prom, was maybe a month or two away from graduation, and a kid at school was making fun of me in foods class. I totally blew up on her and left the class. I came back a few minutes later and the teacher was telling the entire class that they should be nicer to me because "she may be autistic" and the entire class laughed at me as I walked in. (By the way I am probably autistic because of various reasons but this was not how any of that should have went down either way.)

I didn't go back for the rest of the school year. I missed my own graduation since I didn't have enough credit to graduate because I failed the classes I missed finals in. After graduation the school called me and asked me to come back, before the end of semester, to do two or three projects and then do summer school so I could graduate.

During summer school I got pregnant because I was so desperate for someone to love me the way I wanted to be loved. (I don't recommend this… Even though it kinda worked out for me.)

First half of my 20s I was a stay-at-home mom because I was a single mom and lived with my parents. Me staying home and not earning money actually was cheaper than me trying to work and put my kid in daycare.

I tried continued education multiple times as an adult.
I did some community college, then tried to learn things online, nothing ever worked and so I resorted to just working retail for the second half of my 20s.

*** This is the big part of this whole post where I explained that although most of the trauma I've explained was social based, the entire experience of high school, the entire experience of those classes and failing and never being able to catch up was in the background of all that social trauma and had to be buried and ignored to survive. So now as an adult, I feel extreme anxiety while trying to learn things as if it's still bottled up and not leaving my body. I have tried some ADHD meds but they just make me feel hyper focused on all my distractions not necessarily on the topic at hand.

In 2022 I started dating a friend of a friend. We both fell in love very quickly, which hadn't happened for either of us before. 4 months into our relationship we both quit our jobs, went to a web development boot camp, and with his help, I learned enough to be able to get a job in web development. I couldn't have done it without him. There were a lot of meltdowns where he just like a saint patiently to help me through it.

(Fast forward two more years and now we are engaged and we are very happy. We will be getting married on our four year anniversary and there is zero doubt in the minds of anybody that we know that this is end game. A bit of a side tangent but wanted to share)

Now here I am as a web developer, a career where you need to be continually learning because it is an ever-changing profession and I have struggling to get on track and learn things.

Every inconvenience feels like a huge mountain.

The idea of sitting down and learning sounds like the worst possible torture.

My fiance (38m) cannot take the time to teach me things he doesn't know because we went two totally different paths in web development. He's more of a software engineer.

My first project that started at the end of 2022 was ending at the end of October 2024. While I have learned a ton. I'm paralyzed by the fact that I don't know what my next project is, I don't know what I need to know for it, I don't even know where to start. Honestly if it wasn't for AI I don't know if I would actually have this job right now. Because AI has helped me through most of the things I needed to do.

And I have friends who do web development / software engineering and they just listen to YouTube videos and keep up with news on the topics they find interesting and so forth.

I just don't have any clue how to become that type of person. Learning makes my body fill with anxiety. Road blocks in learning make me shut down. I feel stressed and want to just give up on it all..

But this is my new profession, it pays well and it's what I want to be doing…. But I feel like my body has no drive or perseverance when it comes to the struggles with learning.

I want to be one of those people that becomes a lifelong learner.

I'm just kind of reaching out there to see if anybody feels the same way as me and came up with good methods.

Please feel free to ask any questions I'm actually kind of late night rambling and I feel like maybe I didn't get my point across very well but we'll see.