music, therapy, and me

It is time to finish this all up. I am ready to be on my way into my future, but I have to do the process of saying goodbye to clients and co-workers before I can get started. Kids are crying at the thought of my leaving. Co-workers are stopping me in the hallway to tell me that they will miss me. All of that is fine, but it is more attention than I am comfortable with. At my last job, they forgot that I was leaving on my last day and scrambled to get me some roses (which I am very allergic to) as a good luck token. I kinda prefer that type of departure to having to go through gifts and recognitions. Celebrating myself is not something I am comfortable with in groups of people. I just don't like it. I am steeped in nostalgia this week. I have spent lots of time thinking about old clients as I have been taking things out to my car. Remembering is a good exercise when you are shifting into a new reality, but it can also make it difficult to leave. I am retiring from my current job be...

It is difficult to wake up right now, so this is going to be a short post because I was up at midnight, did not get back to sleep, and now am wanting to get the sleep that I missed. My eyes are bleary, and my brain is not wanting to go to my hot music therapy space to clean, do therapy sessions, and clean some more. I am going to be "late" to work today - I can feel it. I have reached the "I don't care" stage of this termination process. This is not a good place to be, but it is happening now rather than a year ago, so that's good. Everything that is going on is temporary for me. Who cares about the clinical team meeting? Not me. Who cares about whether the thermometer gets fixed? Well, that is something that I care about at the moment, but I only have seven more days of work. I have ten days until I actually am finished. Having a deadline is making me feel frazzled as well as excited, but it is difficult to get up in the mornings. My Seasonal Affective Diso...

I did not make anything yesterday, but I did move my desk to a different orientation in my office/craft basement room. That has resulted in a huge mess, but it has also allowed me to see things and evaluate how things are arranged in my living space. It was worth the strain on my back to have a new orientation for my working space. I am almost finished with the transition. I still need to move things off the desk and into more permanent locations, but I am not finished figuring those places out. I have invested in lots of different types of storage options for all the different things that I have collected, so I am trying to figure out where these things will live from now on. The main problem that I have is that I have to remove things from places so I can fill those places back up with other stuff... As I move things, I often find inspiration in the form of notes or resources that I have collected and then not looked at for a time. I have old ideas that I want to develop further writ...

My home is full of stuff. Music Therapy stuff that I have collected, curated, and used over my career of 33 years as a music therapist. Thirty of those years were at a facility where I worked with school-aged clients in a residential and school setting, so I have lots of materials that are meant to spark the most uninterested of people into some sort of interaction. Add into that all the years of textbook purchases, intern training information, and several decades as a church musician, and I have lots of music and music therapy stuff around, and it is piling up. Right now, my focus is on getting things from work to home. I am almost finished with that process. Once everything is home, I will be ready to organize into my piles - give, sell, toss, and keep. Fortunately, once everything is home in two weeks, I will have all sorts of time to engage in organizing, but I am starting to do some of that right now. I am looking around my space and am trying to envision how I will need to access...

Today is my busiest music therapy day during the summer. I have five music therapy groups and one leisure skill group to get through in a hot, humid room where I cannot change the air conditioning level. After today, I have only five more sessions to get through before a three day weekend. Last week, one of my afternoon groups arrived 30 minutes early and then got miffed when I asked them to leave and return when they were scheduled. "But it was at noon on the board in the classroom." "The schedule says 12:30. I'll see you all again in 30 minutes." "Hmph." (That was the staff member.) I thought I was losing my mind. Let's hope that doesn't happen again today. We are exploring my decrepit piano this week. It keeps breaking and then breaking more, but it is time to use it before I leave. Many of my students do not realize that the instrument is in the music therapy room all the time. They act like they have never seen the instrument before despit...

For my entire career, I have rebelled against the idea of session planning. I struggled with procedure sections in my undergrad training. I've written about this recently - how I would take the example in our practicum handbook, change the details but not the format, and would be told that it "was not right." That was all the feedback that I would get. I would ask how to make those sections "right," and no one could tell me how to do that. I had a revelation in the summer between my junior and senior years (thank all that is good in the universe), and then I was able to figure it all out, but that experience has left me a bit leery of writing session plans. One of the biggest issues that I have with session plans is that there is so much that happens in a session, and it is impossible to foresee every response. Plain old impossible! So, I don't write session plans. I haven't for my entire career because I find the practice to be busywork. Instead, I focu...