I hope you feel better!! Not being able to sleep because you feel like crap is horrible

The 'consulting' I'm doing is pretty bad. It's like I've gone back in time to my early-20s at an entry level job. These people want help desk. It's all responsive, not strategic. The sort of snide comments about my part-time status are getting pretty annoying, too. The CEO came up to me and said 'you're not in tomorrow, are you?'
'No, I'll be in the day after. Is there something you need?'
'Well, tomorrow would have been a good day to set up X.'
'X hasn't landed yet.'
'Yeah, well tomorrow would have been a good day.'

What am I supposed to make of that? You want me to set up something that's not here on a day I don't work? Am I missing something? I think I tend to read a lot of bad intentions in stuff like this, instead of just careless thinking.

Hiring contractors is a thought, but this is so not the business I want to be in. This particular company would not go for that, anyway. It figures, too, that they can go for eight years with no IT person at all, and having a part-time person for 3 months is just too annoying. Give me a break, really.

I'm also struggling with this on a personal level because in the past, I would burn myself out by working as long as I had to in order to get things done. When people nag me about whether or not something is done yet, I already feel bad about not having done it.

Sometimes I feel like my life is just one set of frustrating social encounters after another. It really has to be me. I am not sure if it's the way I interpret things or how I project or what, but it's like everyone annoys me. More volunteer project annoyances, more conflict with my BF.

Neither of my parents have mentioned grandkids. I think they were both happy that none of us had kids while we were still living at home. My mother actually said at one point that her life would have been much better if she had not met my father and had kids at a young age!

I'm not sure if this information would be useful for your situation, but you might be interested in reading some of the research into regret, specifically omission regret. As we get older, we tend to regret the things we didn't do, the opportunities we passed up, more than we regret the things we actually did. It makes sense in a lot of ways - as we are just getting started with choosing how to live our lives, the stack of things we didn't do isn't that big. There's always time to do it later. When we start to run out of time and we start to make this choice instead of that, that stack of missed opportunities just keeps on growing.

My class is just one afternoon a week. I did sign up again. I was so tempted not to, but it's actually one of the few social things I do where I want to get to know the people better. It's sort of like being a regular at a neighborhood bar. I also wonder why I would quit my class before I would quit some of the seriously aggravating volunteer projects or fooling around online. There's so many places I could trim some fat - why am I picking something that's actually a pretty good thing?

Your therapist has a good point that if you are spending your mental energy and time wondering whether or not therapy is right, it's not really going to be as helpful as it could be. I find myself doing that kind of thing frequently, where I spend a lot of time trying to decide whether or not I should do X, way more time than I would actually spend just *doing* X.

I've been sort of trying to stop myself from doing that by committing temporarily. I am not sure if the approach works or not, but I feel like I might get more done this way, by committing to do X for two months and then re-evaluating. Sometimes the re-evaluating doesn't actually happen, sometimes the right decision becomes very clear a month in. I just don't want to think about it, you know?

I also look for the exit. Like with the pottery - I can eat the money I paid for the class and quit if I want. If I don't want to work for these people, I can quit. You can quit your therapy anytime you want. Does reminding yourself of that help at all? It does for me, but I am not sure why.