I have 395 transactions on that account Does that effect anything?
that is the reason why you have to pay the high fee. in bitcoin you pay the fee based on the size of your transaction in bytes and when you have lots of transaction outputs to spend, the size grows big.
Also, electrum always takes a long time to load, no matter which PC.
that is also possibly because of the large number of transactions. since you said they were payments, they probably are big payouts that they combine lots of inputs and have lots of outputs and each tx is huge. and in your wallet file which is being loaded, all of these are saved and need to be loaded.
Thoughts and suggestions on what I can do? I assumed I would be able to send at least .38 to another wallet, but it seems that I won't be able to and i'll be stuck with .25 out of .38 BTC
go to your Send tab, enter receiving address, click max but now click the Preview button. a new window opens up which you can see there is a line in there saying "Size". that is the size of your transaction in bytes.
you can do these things:
1) set a 1-1.5 satoshi/byte fee for your transaction and wait a very long time. it may take weeks until mempool is empty again and some miner picks up your transaction
2) set the fee to 10 satoshi/byte and then use
https://pool.viabtc.com/tools/txaccelerator/ to accelerate it. you may have to try multiple times if it is crowded and others were using it.