I am 44 years old, I ended up on disability in 2003 and haven't worked a job ever since. I have two degrees one in computer science and one in business management. I earned the later after I was disabled and graduated with honors. I suffer from schizo-affective disorder and when I developed that mental illness I lost 95% of my friends and family who basically abandoned me, and wrote me off as a loser and failure. I lost my job and my career was basically ruined as well.
I learned over 37 different programming languages over 30 years of my life, and most if not all are obsolete. Like Turbo Pascal, FORTRAN, COBOL, ADA, 8086 Assembly Language, JCL/JECL, etc. Yes I worked with a variety of different operating systems and computers. Even mainframes and minicomputers as well as many old 8 bit microcomputers, etc.
Pointers, basically some modern languages did away with them. It seems one has to learn how computer memory works to figure out how to use a pointer, and for that one has to learn how a computer works. But if they can eliminate pointers and direct access in modern languages then more people can learn how to program. Many programmers forgot to set their pointers and ended up with a null pointer that may have been set to the address of 0 (system memory) or may have been set to some random address that happened to be in the memory the location of the pointer is stored at. Basically a pointer holds a memory address to a block of memory that data is being stored at. But it seems to be too complex for most people to understand. Back in my days in learning Pascal and Pre-ANSI C it was required to learn.
Anyway don't feel like you are a loser or a failure, just learn from your mistakes and failures and then keep trying until you get better. That is how we human beings learn. It is how we learned to walk as infants. We fell down a lot, had to crawl first, but basically we put one foot in front of the other and learned how to keep our balance and walk. But we don't remember all the times trying to walk that we failed and made mistakes.
Startups are like that too, I want to share a link to a blog. Some flag it as offtopic because it talks about mental illnesses and technology and startups, yet when others post those same things it makes the front page. This post in the blog is about losers and why there are no losers: http://fakemdc.blogspot.com/2013/02/there-are-no-losers-just...
Steve Jobs suffered failures and mistakes and it cost him his job at Apple in 1985. But he didn't give up, he kept trying and trying and learning from mistakes and failures. Many people did the same thing.
If you want to talk about it, my email is orionblastar@gmail.com