I'm having a hard time not checking the emails. The reality is that they need someone full time and they need occasional night and weekend coverage. My problem is that I don't want to be full time and I don't want to work off hours.. but I also want to keep this work for a while longer, so I don't want to tell them 'Hey, you need to hire someone full time and I'm not interested.'

I need to focus on finding new clients or going back to my software projects. I need to stop looking at their stuff when I am not working. Just kind of reminding myself...

Also, I know my boss does not expect me to do more work than I can, but some people don't seem to understand that I am not full time. I also am pretty annoyed about having everyone treat me like some sort of helpdesk person- which is the role I'm stuck with at this place.

There are more or less three divisions. One division is full of friendly people. The other two are full of the kinds of people who think anyone who doesn't have their job is a moron... people who want me to fix the printer which turns out to have an empty paper tray...

I am *really* noticing how hard it is to be female in a male dominated industry. I watched a female cardiologist get bossed around by a patient who couldn't unmute his TV last week. I feel like some of the people I work around think of me as 'less than.' And I kind of chuckle to myself because there are some extremely self important people who call themselves 'software developers' at this place, but what they are doing bears very little resemblance to what anyone in the software industry would call development.

My father, like yours, isn't mean on purpose. He's just incapable of thinking about anyone's needs beyond his own - and he can't really cope with those at this point. According to him he is depressed (it goes beyond depressed, imo). He used to be somewhat functional but he just seems to get more crazy and less functional every year. He just can't cope with life. Really, I look at both of my parents and have grave worries about my own future!

Do any of your siblings have kids? None of us do and I can guess why!

I'm not sure how you wrap up therapy goals into SMART goals, but maybe your therapist knows. He *has* to have a way of measuring success. And what *does* a 'better sense of self' look like? What if you already have that and don't even know it?! How will you know when you're there?

I am probably going to do the pottery class again. I really enjoy a lot of the people there (and it could be a source of future work). I am just at this point where I am trying to cram 70 hours worth of stuff into 40 hours worth of time and sooner or later I need to come to grips with the fact that it won't work. No one can do everything. This is really hard for me to grasp, I guess.

I think you are right about bad jobs being draining. Who has the mental space for anything interesting when we're dealing with annoying people and situations all day?