Cheap scribes are just fancy potato peelers.

Sitting in your car for 10 minutes is not some magic trick, it is just giving yourself time to calm down before you go inside. The rain and the quiet probably helped more than the parking lot itself. You had a rough shift, so of course you felt better after a few minutes of doing nothing. Most people would feel the same way. Call it a reset if you want, but it is really just a break.

The part about the prompt never being the point is close but maybe a little off. The prompt is still the point, it's just that you were reading it as a topic to cover instead of a door to walk through. Dana didn't tell you to ignore the prompt, she told you to shrink what you were doing inside it. Two sentences about a gas station at 2am is still an answer to the prompt, it just trusts the reader to find the life story on their own. I had to unlearn the same thing, that covering more ground feels safer but usually just means you never land anywhere.