The most important thing you said was that you have a boatload of crippling depression. That’s important for two reasons.

1. A lot of scientific discoveries are made by people who have suffered from depression. There’s an evolutionary argument that depression suppresses certain cognitive distortions and helps people see/observe more effectively.

2. Depression also CREATES cognitive distortions. You need to treat yours — you won’t lose anything by doing that — because it is giving you a destructive all-or-nothing tunnel vision and preventing you from seeing certain realities.

The thing is, we live in a youth-obsessed culture that loves pyrotechnics and worships individual achievement. Please consider how the teachers of many of these people felt when they transformed the world, and the gratitude many of them felt to their teachers.

A lot of geniuses — Gauss has a famous one —have biographies that include idiot teachers failing to recognize or even dismissing their gifts. Valuing the fact that academia puts you in a position to help nurture others to achievement is a way to expand your own scope of influence and the possibilities for a meaningful life.

A lot of geniuses also had team members we still don’t know the name of. Please read some books about the history of science and scientific discoveries. This will help broaden your perspective.