OP, you sound distressed. It's not healthy to put so much weight, (i.e, your very physical and financial future) upon the acquisition of a skill. Very few people can master a skill while emotionally unstable. Here is my story and the wisdom I've gained so far. It's very long, but I hope it can help you see the trees for the forest so to speak.

I learned this wisdom firsthand when I had a nervous breakdown while taking a Fortran class with a very strict and demanding professor. I felt like I was simply a waste of life no matter how I approached the class. Compounded by my ex girlfriend destroying half my social circle, my situation felt like bobbing up and down in a wavy ocean. Drowning one moment, barely breathing the next.

Drowning still and venturing towards escapism, the turmoil I went through which made me seriously investigate how much I wanted to be a computer scientist. I still wanted it. But, I was so anxious about everything that my conventional (failed) strategies were simply not going to help me survive the semester.

So, I played games while emotionally unstable. Even now, it transforms my time so I can think without so much anxiety. Here was where my epiphany started. Sitting there in the dark, I realized I had wasted so much of my teenage years grinding away on mmos, loving it, yet still deeply wondering if there was a way to play them while still living a life outside of a computer.

In my journey, I started by creating xp calculators that printed out xp at a given area per hour onto a text file. While it was very helpful in the game and in restoring my confidence, I knew I needed ingame money to reach my goal: to game on this grindy mmo without having to sit there in the darkness all day and night.

I began merching because it wasted the least amount of my time for the greatest returns. Perpetually low on funds ingame, I researched items in the game to see if there was some kind of niche everyone else had missed. A week or two later, I figured out a category of items was inefficiently handled by other merchants.

Using math to describe what I understood, I then put a formula into action with a calculator and applied it to the game. Noticing it was annoying to place the whole thing into a calculator, I thought more about it and realized I had created an algorithm. With the knowledge I gained in class, I wrote a program that could do the math for me. What happened next was like something out of a movie: my ingame wealth quintupled after three days of usage.

I'd have been richer ingame if I'd continued using it, but I was finally stable enough in my mind to go and try my smartest in school. By tying programming to my hobbies rather than thinking of it as a way to continue my hobbies, I found new purpose and my second wind.

Trying everything under the sun to get my grades up, I asked questions to my mildly hostile professor, I read from my books in a library, and I spent idle time finding new ideas to program to keep my skills sharp enough for school. Dude, I passed with flying colors.

I'm still lousy at studying sometimes, but programming itself has become so interconnected with my hobbies that I can't picture myself engaging with them in any other way. Rather than just being a skill, it has become a part of my personality. I am currently trying to write macros for a particular game that will not get me banned. Whenever I have free time, that is.

tl;dr: Find a way to relate programming to your own life, in a way that it doesn't equate to your life or death.