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[quote=Anonymous]OP here.  thanks for a ton a great advice, and, especially a diversity.

A few thoughts:

1. My DH is not a schlub.  Though ie hs the "routine maintenance" type. He takes care of all the laundry, manages most doctors' appointments and is home more often than I am.  He is the parent DD especially goes ti with trouble.  He makes plenty of money for someone who does all this ($400k).    So that is not my problem

2.  I have help at work as well -- I have a personal assistant, and I've hired a  couple more people for help with specific things. I struggle to let things go and my job involves so..many..things.  Many readers are right that of course I should chunk most of my to do list -- I don't look at most of it (it's a database, I'd never read it like that).  I think the real question is how to stop putting more into it as well as how to throw material away.

3. I probably am a perfectionist now.  I never was but COVID isolation made me rigid and weirdly reliant on routine and structure.  I'm struggling to go back to how I was.

4.  Please go ahead and call me an entitled privileged teenager.  But in my job, I actually handle your entitled privileged teenager as a real part of it. I am a highly successful, and even well-known, scientist who is paid by a college (so otherwise known as a college professor that you are mad doesn't actually teach your children.)  What I have learned from this experience is that there are adults in life and there are children and the reality is that ti doesn't have much to do with age beyond early childhood.  It is temperament.  You caught me at a low moment, and I still am, and I am not as "adult" as many of my collegues, but I am like most of them - I play an adult and then tantrum if you know me well.  I tantrumed on an anonymous forum so I could continue to be the adult in the room during the day.  Though I think the real reason I am down is that being the "adult" and doing 400 pages worth of boring paperwork, signing reports, and handling the HR crises of my research group is really boring compared to be in the lab hyperfocused on a great new idea like a kid playing a video game, except you are actually curing cancer.  I want to get back to that, and need to figure out how.  If only life coaches weren't snake oil salesmen...

5. More seriously, thank you for the honest accounts of realignment at middle age.  It is so difficult, but I guess one needs to see it as an opportunity, and work on it. I am going to try. Maybe meds if not, and will try not to worry about my crappy medical insurance issues and other similar stuff in the mean time.

Thanks DCUM.[/quote]

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