I think you need to focus on your priorities here. As I understand you're currently jobless and obviously have no health benefits, and are on the verge of becoming homeless. Doing three months of "intense manual labor" to get a paycheck and health benefits is (in my view at least) far preferable to being homeless and penniless.
My perception of your reply is that you think the Amazon warehouse job is beneath you; does homelessness appeal more? Seriously, at this stage, in the very short run, your number one priority should be to avert homelessness, and do whatever it takes. I know you mentioned back pain, but if the Amazon warehouse isn't your thing, there should be something else you can do to tide you over.
More broadly as lot of commenters have very kindly offered to talk to you and help you in various ways. That is an immense gift! Make use of it, and don't make them regret offering their assistance.
You're in a bad place mentally right now, but you're young, you're not stupid and you can get out of this, but you need to be willing to put in the effort. Asking the question here is a very good first step.
Lastly, you may also want to visit Ask A Manager [1] which has a lot of good advice on cover letters, resumes, interviewing, etc. It's not tech-specific, but most of the advice applies universally.
Good luck!
I won't lie and say it was as fun as traditional programming. But QA means a lot of different things, and just because you had a really bad experience with it (and I've heard terrible things about EA in general, not just their QA department), you should definitely be looking at QA for job opportunities that will meet your needs. Realistically you're going to be better suited to a lot of QA jobs right now, and employers are going to be more open to taking a chance on you given your history.
More senior qa roles will be designing test suites, maybe even developing them, but entry level game QA is not going to scratch a dev itch.
This isn’t true? https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/operations/healthcare-from-...
Instacart (in some locations) allows you to sign up just to do the shopping (then the drivers pick it up).
Taskrabbit will definitely have some things you can do without driving as well.
Just explore the options; something where you can set your own schedule would be really nice while you're job hunting and interviewing.
Don't put any of the above on your resume.
What are you looking for? You haven't really elaborated on what your skills are except for alluding to a possible penchant for security research. If that's really what you want to do (and you think you have enough knowledge of networking technologies and security practices that it's really your best path forward), do that!
If you hunt for bug bounties, and blog about your findings (even if you don't hit any), that's going to be a really good way for potential employers to audit your capabilities.
If you're looking to get into software development, publish some work on github or get involved with an open source project. Even filing issues is a great way to showcase your ability to work within a team and contribute. QA is often a great stepping stone into the world of software engineering, and (depending on the type of QA), you really just need to be computer literate, dedicated, and capable of working with a team. Those are things you can demonstrate on github.
It's not going to be an easy path forward, but getting some income you can live off of right now, then pouring all of your energy into working in the open is going to be your best path to getting hired. You don't have the resume to get the kinds of jobs your looking for, and it sounds like you haven't even had the kinds of jobs that would look impressive to potential employers