Yours sounds like a fascinating story.
Sorry for the length of this, but I think you'll get it before it's done.
It was a grind. I worked on boats and went to school for eight years until I got into college (Harvey Mudd in Claremont). Arrived there $4000 short of affording the first year. Lived in my car for the second semester.
Frankly, I'm too wild and crazy to the the engineer I became, but then I didn't become an engineer to be one; I wanted to understand tangibly how wealth is created because I saw a serious social problem developing as the Japanese were killing us in manufacturing. I was fired twice and then executed a turnaround for a division of a Fortune 200 company.
Now I live in the mountains above Silicon Valley having done research in restoration ecology no one had even contemplated, currently studying and writing about the guy who precipitated our social meltdown and comparing that to a novel interpretation of the Hebrew Torah from a pastoralist's perspective.
Everything in my life was necessary for me to understand what I'm working on, from my dad's career in municipal finance and bonds, my parents' divorces, going through private Catholic school, after school daycare at the Jewish Community Center, and at Church as an Episcopalian. Through the drug craze of San Francisco, to being homeless. Then clawing my way back in analyzing the wreckage of my life in EST. Then Mudd and the jobs. Then marriage to a woman who actually understands and can tolerate me. I was the first author of a local Agenda 21 Biodiversity and Ecosystem Management document. When I quit my last job to home school the girls and write that first book, I became free as an intellectual to research the causes of our economic decline having been a project manager.
In doing so, I learned of the globalist project and decided to take my family "the other way." We joined a Messianic Jewish congregation. There I discovered the original purpose of the Biblical Sabbath for the Land. That became the second book and is an element of current research, as it exposes an entirely novel way to see the antediluvian Torah. It was too radical for the congregation to handle it.
Out of that book came documentation of our restoration project. That is the third book. Then, after my beloved daughter and FReeper NattieShea, was turned into a childless leftist harpie by Stanford, I embarked upon the fourth book I'm working on now about the guy who engineered that social meltdown, whom I regard as the most influential person of the 20th Century. Virtually nobody has ever heard of him.
I'm the luckiest researcher alive to have made so many unprecedented discoveries along the way. It's been amazing.
It's a challenge before G_d to finish this work before I die, to trust Christ to keep me alive that long. If I become famous, I'm surrounded with leftists who would gladly do me in for it, despite that I've created a way for us all to get out of this witless conflict, to allow reality to teach us how we must conduct ourselves to keep the planet alive. It has taught me to drop much of the anger at what they've done in the interest of healing. Reality on the land is a better teacher than I am anyway.