I'm More Than My Job...I Mean, I Know This, But I Have to Remind Myself Every Once In a While...

I am proud to be a music therapist. I am proud of my profession and of what I do on a regular basis. I truly think that this profession is the best fit for me, but there are times when I become so immersed in being a music therapist and making music therapy things and trying to spread my music therapy message in the world where I forget that there is more to life than my profession.

At the beginning of all of this COVID stuff, I was feeling constrained by my situation and frustrated at how my life was progressing. This led me into a period of introspection (as such feelings often do), and I realized that my social media footprint was really around music therapy things. I don't have many groups that are not music therapy based on my various feeds. I decided to branch out into other groups that are about things that are not music therapy AT ALL!

(Pause here for an audible gasp from the author!)

I thought about where I wanted to spend more time, and then I went exploring around the internet.

I ended up asking to join two paper crafting related groups. One is for Happy Mail, because who doesn't love getting things in the mail? The other is an intimidating junk journal group that has over four thousand people in it and that shares so many posts every day that I am overwhelmed looking at the projects of people who do not seem to take as much time as I do when completing ANYTHING! Seriously, these folks can take a discarded envelope and turn it into a work of art! I am nowhere near this level of paper crafting (yet) and the style isn't really something that I am good at or even really like, so it is a bit of a downer to spend much time in the group. (I also did a no-no and posted a blog post and was reprimanded, so I'm very cautious about how much I interact on the group. Bad MJ.)

I sent out my first contribution to the Happy Mail Group last Friday. We sign up for swaps with other group members and then we send them off into the world - kinda like crafty pen pals. The project was a loaded bag - something I thought I could do because the project was simple - take a lunch bag (the paper kind, of course), fold it into an envelope-type thing, and then stuff it with papery stuff.

Here's what I sent out into the world. I took my bag, covered it with cheerful scrapbook paper, added some eyelets on the sides and then stuffed it with as much stuff as I could find. I made a mini notebook (that you can't see right now) out of an index card and some fancy papers. The stripey thing towards the top is an envelope notebook (made out of envelopes and designed to hold bits and pieces), there are some watercolored cards, some decorative paperclips, and some washi tape samples there on the front. All of these things are things that I use when I make papery things, so it was fun to think about what I could share with my pen pal.

AT LAST! An outlet for my desire to make things and then share them with others! This group is providing me with an outlet as well as challenges that are something other than music therapy. In fact, in this group, no one knows anything about me except that I enjoy making things! This is exciting for me!

Now that I am back to work (almost full-time - one and a half weeks of part-time at work and part-time at home), I have less time for projects, but I am still working on getting some things done. I haven't signed up for another swap yet because I am still trying to figure out my new craft room setup and get things organized enough to sit down and actually craft. I did enjoy the challenge and it seems to have been received well by my pen pal.

I guess the reason that this was my topic for this morning is that I have to remind myself to move away from being a music therapist at times. I lecture others about this very topic quite often, but it is difficult for me to remember it without another person telling me that I've become too narrow in my outlook on life. I am going to look for some other groups to join - things that do not require me to participate quite so actively as my Happy Mail group but that offer me some inspiration and some fun.

Self-care, right?

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