I actually seriously considered calling in sick this morning, for the first time in this job yet.

Very, very lucky to have an employer understanding enough to not mind me turning up an hour late, as long as i text him to let him know beforehand. (Mind you, i pretty much always end up "working" about an hour beyond the time i'm "supposed" to finish, depending on where exactly the kind-of-fuzzy-in-my-case boundary between "work" and "non-work" time lies...)

Taking an hour and a half from my alarm going off to actually being able to get out of bed is not good.

(see previous)

Well, i thought things were going OK at work, in terms of being pretty well reassured that my work was valued and my job was secure, but then came in today to find the other PA there and the whole stress/emotional rollercoaster thing set off again.

I was really, really happy with and appreciative of being the only worker working for/with my "boss" (still a fucking weird thing to call him, the word carries so many implications of Evi£ Ba$tard for me which makes it so incongruous to use), because one of the biggest problems in every paid job i've ever previously had was getting in the way of co-workers when what tasks were whose responsibility were not precisely defined, or the same task was several people's responsibility, without any agreed-on way of dividing it up.

Today in the couple of hours of being there while she was there, my stress levels just went absolutely through the roof, to the point of almost not being able to process simple instructions. Felt i couldn't *be* anywhere without being in her way, felt utterly redundant because there's nothing i can do that she can't do better... which led me into my typical depressive thought spirals of how i can't exist anywhere without taking up someone else's space, and thus don't deserve existence (luckily, at the moment anyway, those thoughts/feelings are short-lived and i'm not getting "stuck" in them the way i was for days/weeks at a time last winter).

OK, it's only one day a week, and only the first couple of working hours of a day, 2 hours out of 18 i work, but i think it's still going to be hugely problematic.

I really obviously don't want to throw away the whole job over this (as it's both by far the best working situation and the *first* real financial stability i've ever had in my life), but i clearly need some workarounds/coping strategies.

Any ideas?