Good lord, man. Do you realize how in-demand great designers who actually know how to code/talk to coders?

Even if you don't want to do web app design, plenty of people survive working in art galleries/museums or as pure commercial graphic designers/illustrators.

Lastly, you're not destined for a damn thing at the age of 20 (or any other age). I graduated with a psychology degree and worked min-wage/retail for 3 years in Anchorage, Alaska. I then worked the graveyard shift at a residential treatment facility. I've since built and sold 3 startups (one a venture-backed YC company). My dad was driving a cab at 35 and retired an SVP of Sun Microsystems (he spent lots of time with Steve Jobs, Ross Perot, and Ron Conway in his career).

If you talk to people in their 30s and 40s about what they were doing when they were 20, I think you'll find that the majority of them have reinvented themselves a few times. Figure out what you want to do and take the first step in that direction. Then take the next. You'll get there!

Well, there's another difficult lesson there - there's no such thing as 'destiny', however much it may feel that way sometimes. Many people willingly or unwillingly follow the random wind of fate and think of it as destiny but it is just the nature of life that 'things happen'.

The good news is that knowing this frees you up somewhat - your life is yours to control. The trick is working out what you want (and you apparently have some idea now, more than most 20 year-olds) and then what steps you need to take to get there.

Some suggestions:

1) Beware the myth of the overnight success - getting where you want to go in life almost always involves many incremental steps and lots of work, yet we are surrounded by stories of companies and individuals who hit the jackpot and found success instantly. In reality that almost never happens and what we usually don't hear about are the years of trial-and-error and effort that went into building that success.

2) If C++ is your strength, perhaps you could find a way to use that to finance the transition? In the short-term, another coding job could give you the money to pay for art/design training and help you move into the career you really want. The key here is to get the best out of your free time. This is one way to avoid the 'fate' that you fear - use the lemons you have to make the lemonade you want.

3) As some other people have said, tell us what you can do and what you've been working on, and perhaps someone here will be able to offer you some freelance work to help with your cashflow.

Sorry to hear that your Dad and your friends are being so unhelpful. All I can offer there is one of the great 'aha!' moments in my life so far - when people are being persistently unpleasant to you, it almost always reflects insecurities that they hold about themselves, rather than something you've done wrong per se. You've come to a difficult point in your life and throwing blame or sarcasm around does nothing to change that, only appeases their demons for a short while. I don't know if that helps at all but it helped me to realise that I wasn't to blame for other peoples' anger - we all make mistakes and have difficult times but the constructive thing to do is to find a way deal with them and move forward, not wallow in the problems we perceive others have visited upon us (I'm referring still to your father and friends, not to you).

Enough rambling; I hope that helps and wish you the best of luck in the future.

After running out of cash on my second startup I got a job waiting tables. I took the opportunity to learn to sell and interact with customers. It's become a handy skill. Now I'm a lead engineer with a nice salary, just got a 20% raise, but guess what.. FUCK THAT. Guys like us weren't meant to live the middle path. Your dad doesn't get it, just like my dad doesn't get it. We're not here to make our dads happy. They made their life, and we're making ours. I've got my next-product that I'm working on, I have customers that I talk to, and now I'm going to leave my comfort (salaried job) to hustle some deals. Each failure is one step closer to success.

When we're 40 and homeless, we're gonna have some damn good stories to tell. Get some exercise, get your mind off your situation, watch Office Space to remind yourself why we're not some yes-man schmucks. It really does get better, trust me.

Most artists aren't professional artist. The people that consider themselves professional artists are a sliver of a percentage. All the artists I know have day jobs, be it bartender, office manager, public administration. So bang out the C code, clock out at quitting time and enjoy your life. Contrary to what you may read on YC, no one is ever an overnight success.