Moving out

Over the years I have seen some people who graduated from the same university I did succeed in careers in the same basic field I work in.
I admire them not only for their talent and discipline, but some of the choices they made early on.
These people did not immediately go to work for a big company or find immediate success as a freelancer.
They remained living at home with their parents. Not as lazy freeloaders, but rather people committed to and honing their craft and building their own thing. In the case of illustrators, they weren't necessarily making money yet, but they were continuing to build their skills and portfolios. The goal of this is that they could do what they wanted to do really well and, therefore, create something of quality that people may seek out and pay for.
They weren't wasting so many hours of a day working some entry level position. But the hours of hard work on their artwork is real and more significant in the long term.

I sometimes feel that I could have done this for a while; that I moved out too soon. Age-wise, it was high time, but career-wise, definitely premature.

If you still live with your parents after college, and "partying" is your primary pastime, then, yeah, it's a problem; you should be prompted from the nest. But if the hours you are spending at home, you are quietly laboring over something like artwork, many parents will understand. There may be a bigger payoff in the long run, rather than jumping into a job and scraping to pay rent in a crappy apartment, and selling all your hours to The Man for pennies on the dollar.

Well, in my case, who knows? Looking back, I was smoking more and more cigarettes. I couldn't do so at home. I really didn't want my folks to see me smoke. I would stay out later at night, sometimes just smoking in my car in a parking lot or a 24 hour restaurant.

I got an offer to rent a room in house a friend was renting. It was a good deal. I still could barely afford it, but I made the leap. The matriarch of the house was a heavy smoker, so there would be no stipulations as far as who or how many people could simultaneously chain smoke for how long and which room.

I feel like I needed to be able to smoke so badly that I blew what could have been an important foundational chapter for me by my nicotine addiction.