Going rogue...
As I'm currently writing, I still haven't found a way or maybe I'm almost there to psych myself to going to college full time. So I'm going rogue. I'm not going to college or taking the traditional career path options of learning a trade.
I'm going to try to submit papers on arXiv and use these papers as references showing that I'm able to work as an independent researcher for an institute for minimum wage—any pay is good in this economy. I don't know how I'm going to do that yet. Maybe browsing arXiv papers to learn what's the current trends and trying to contribute to them. Or studying myself and trying to come up with something. Maybe a mixture of both.
My career advice question—more of a question that needs logical confidence—is if it's possible to do this without the concrete material? You know, if you want to contribute to astronomy, I think you probably need a telescope. My interest is mathematics which I think I can contribute to, but if I take this job, I'm willing to do research for whatever comes up—chemistry, astronomy, other mathematics different from mine, computer science maybe (computer science is heavily dependent on experience), robotics, etc.
Another minor question is if anyone has a good perspective of a learning method to quickly contribute to mathematics. I think I've built my own but sometimes I find myself stuck. I'm looking for something repeatable in the nature of what isn't repeatable.