I would recommend either to build up some RTOS/OS knowledge or excercise your skills in Low-levelish game programming with maybe C and SDL. I found especially these two very rewarding and I'm also making a living on the former for 15 years.
Reframe it. Detach emotionally from the result by offering the fruit of your past and future struggle to god. It is not a self-induced failure, but something that life has thrown at you. The universe just had other plans. Nature has built us specifically to cope with that.
https://wiki.osdev.org/ is a good source for getting a hold in OS development