Oh wow! I get the "five hours typing a response" thing... yup. For important stuff like that, I tend to get painfully detailed and analytical about my word choice, do lots of editing, and then end up creating typos from all the editing But, still.. Yay! Awesome that you were able to put together a response that clearly articulated your needs and boundaries. (Ugh, especially around last minute meetings!)

I think that's a great, and very worthwhile goal! (I could use a goal like that!) I know that the time spent on the email is annoying... but.... but the good part is that you still got it done. And you got some practice in saying what you want/need. And, now that you're annoyed about spending five hours on it, NEXT time you feel yourself sucked into doing it, you can think back to now, and tell yourself, "OK, I want to do this - but I don't need to spend five hours on it!" and maybe set a goal, like getting it down in one hour. (Or 2, and you can shorten it each time). So, it's a step in the right direction. Baby steps, right? Steps in the right direction will still get you where you need to be, even if they're tiny improvements each time!

That's a great point about people writing bad reviews, but not actually taking action to get their issues resolved. You're right - it's easy to complain after the fact, but that doesn't give people the opportunity to fix the issue. It won't always work out, but if we don't give the business/person the opportunity to make something right, we could miss out on something really good over a simple, easily fixable mistake.

re: Internal stability... I hope we can develop it! I'm not sure! I don't know where people get it from. For me it feels like... some people have this internal sense of who they are, or what's right/ok/allowed, whatever. And it's solid and unwavering. No matter what other people do or say, they don't lose that thing on the inside. For me though, there's nothing solid there. My insides change with the winds, it seems. I talk to one person, and I think one thing... I talk to someone else, and everything changes. It kind of sucks, and I probably need to think some more about what this is, and mention it to my therapist (though he probably is already aware of this, I'm guessing.)

And - wow -that is crazy (what you found out from your friend). Ha - nothing's ever simple or straight forward, is it? I do hope it all works out for you! Two months seems like a long time to wait though!

Thanks for the good wishes on my job! I still haven't heard back from the woman that I sent the samples to, so I'm nervous that maybe they were awful. Hopefully she's just been busy. I had a meeting today for the project that's starting back up, and it doesn't look like there's going to be much work for me, at least in the first phase, so that was a little disappointing. But, these clients change their minds a lot, so really, anything could happen. Always something... I'm going to play around with a design tool our team has started using, so I'll at least be able to use that competently if the opportunity comes up

Who knows?! It's all crazy, isn't it?