Thanks. Today was just nuts. Now that I'm going to be out for a few days, *everybody* suddenly wanted to talk to me, and I've just been in meetings and trying to get things ready to hand off all day. Not fun.

Oh, and my boss set a date for presenting on this second project today, without talking to me first. I got an invite, and it's the day after I get back from vacation. Oh yay! Which is why I ended up handing off some of the stuff I was doing to someone else on the team, so that she can worry about getting all this stuff pulled together in the next few days. Seriously, it's a huge project with lots of parts, I don't get it.

We also met to talk through some of the work we're doing. It's all "concepts" at this stage, to sell the work. I put a basic idea together for my piece, walked through it with the team, specifically saying that I didn't have a lot of experience with doing high level concepts and wanted feedback. My boss' feedback was basically that it's too detailed (it's 2 screens). It was really frustrating. That's what I do. I flush out the details of how a system should work from the user's perspective. To expect me to not think about how it works, or interacts with other pieces, or whatever... is just ridiculous.

I just feel like I'm really in the wrong place. And I've known it for a long time. And change is still SO hard!

Anyway, I'm glad I've got a few days off. I've gained back all the weight I lost and feel really miserable and unhealthy, but every time I try to get back to eating better, I get sucked back into sugar due to the crappiness of my job. I'm hoping that 5 days away gives me a little time to do some cooking and re-establish a little bit of a healthy pattern.

So not fun though!

Camping sounds fun! I hope you guys get to go! I'm jealous, I wish I had someone to go camp with!

Oh, and it IS really hard to say exactly how long I've been underutilized at work. We had a big project in late 2013-early 2014 that I was on that I *loved*, great people and really interesting work, very busy, that was good. So it's not 100% of the time. But that was only 4-6 months or so (?). There was one other big project before that that was a lot of fun. Beyond those two, I don't know, it's been years. I have a crappy sense of time (dissociative stuff) so it's really hard for me to pin it down without actually looking through my work records/performance reviews/calendars to try to see what I was doing.

Thanks for your good wishes though. I know, we just talked about this, but I really need to figure something out. It's just so frustrating... like I said... it feels like a bad relationship where your confidence just gets shot, making it hard to imagine finding anything better. At least with relationships, you can survive on your own. Harder to live without a job!

That really sucks that the company you're working for is over-complicating things so badly. I think you mentioned something similar (but with the guy that you report to), it just astounds me that they hire you to do a job, you are ready and able to do the job, and then they put up roadblocks and get in your way.

Maybe that's just what life is though? I mean, it reminds me of how life is on a personal level.. how we (or at least *I*) constantly get in my own way with goals. Like with therapy, I bet at the end of my sessions that my therapist MUST be thinking - "Oh geez, you know you'd get better so much faster if you'd just do what I'm suggesting and get out of your own way!". If life were just that simple!

Have you thought any more about finding other business for your company, so that maybe you can escape these crazy people at some point?