I'm in an odd place and not quite right.

[hunter]

7. I started out with a fondness for hardware...

My 1802 computer had 1 kilobyte of memory. One had to account for every last bit!

My Atari ended up with 128 kilobytes...

Both of those were still too small for even c if you wanted to do anything ambitious. You had to use assembly language.

Python seems friendly to any programming paradigm one chooses. I can see python with pygame being almost as fun to write as Atari 800 stuff.

Does writing code (or anything else) help with the anxiety. I know that I could disappear entirely into it, shove everything else into the background. It was that and running at night, and neither was a good thing.

I met one of my kids at school once and just hanging out with friends in a school Lounge, relaxing. That was not a state I ever achieved in school.

Best wishes to you!