There Are Things That I Will Miss...

This is my last (for now, at least) week of our adjusted schedule. If everything goes as planned, we will be welcoming back our day students and going back to our regular work schedule next Monday.

I admit to some feelings that are coming up that surprise me. First, I am ready to get back to "normal" type work and sleep schedules, but I am also scared that this is temporary. Second, I am going to miss working for four hours a day and then getting home in the early afternoon. I will need to get back to a full-day's schedule attitude and routine. I hope that it will be the last change to how we do things at my job, but my gut tells me that it will not. I will miss being more rested than usual during the summer (when I tend to get Seasonal Affective Disorder). I will also miss the smaller class size and caseload.

I am happy about this upcoming return for several reasons as well - my interns are back! I have had a chance to do music therapy for a sustained amount of time with my residential clients, so I feel that my relationships with them have strengthened. One of the downsides of being the internship supervisor is that I step out of the primary therapeutic role in the lives of my clients. I miss that when it happens, and it happens when I have lots of interns. I have to step out of the role of therapist and into the role of "strange woman who sits in her office and occasionally shows up to tell us what to do."

This past weekend, I was asked a question about what was adding value to my life. I admit that the question staggered me for a bit, but I had manipulated the answering format so I went last rather than first in the interview, so I had a bit of time to think about my answer. There is no real "thing" that is adding value to my life. So I pondered.

My answer ended up being that the situations that we find ourselves in right now are things that are adding value to my life. I feel strongly that the Black Lives Matter push and the COVID-19 pandemic and all of the uncertainty that these events have brought to our lives are extremely valuable - they are making us reevaluate the ways we do things and are spurring us to find different ways of doing the things we need to do. I am trying to change myself to reflect these experiences and these challenges to what I do and why I do things the way I do things.

It sounds silly, but I am finding all of this interesting. When I am able to interact with things using my rational brain, I can see this as a turning point for society as a whole. When I am in my emotional brain, I focus only on the emotions that are prevalent - fear, grief, anxiety - and I can't really see any sort of benefit in what we are doing right now. I prefer my rational brain to my emotional brain.

I am going to be heading to work in about 45 minutes (if I can keep myself at home until I am supposed to leave, but I'm not usually successful in this quest) to supervise sessions run by my intern. I will add some thing into the student store (since that is also one of my jobs), and then I will leave the facility and head out into the noon-time world to come home to a recently cleaned craft table and a bit more cleaned home. There are three things on my to-do list for this afternoon - give the cat her shot, clean out the cat box, and run the dishwasher.

With a return to "more regular," I will need to take some of the lessons that I have learned from the past three months into my routine. I like having time to do things in my craft room after work. I am enjoying my less cluttered home. I enjoy coming up with new things to do in my various interest streams. Yesterday, I took an hour to cut images out of some of the magazines that I have difficulties throwing out. I moved my old, clunky television into the craft room so I can have some auditory stimulation while I am working on things back there. I steam cleaned the carpet in that room as the last thing that I did before climbing into bed.

I am still working on the entire "stay up until a time when an adult goes to sleep" goal that I have for myself, but I hope to be adjusting my routine just enough so I can do more in my craft room right before bed. That seemed to work well yesterday, so why not see if I can sustain it? I will be picking up my work bullet journal again, and I will be using it to organize the tasks that I have at work. I am in the process of moving to a new bullet journal for my home and part-time work, so I am not doing all that much there right now. Next week starts the new journal - one I have designed for myself. We will see.

It is time to shift my focus again - back to how things have functioned in our school before. I hope that we will make changes to help us the next time this all happens... (While I am glad to be moving forward, I feel that we are not finished with any of the things that we are working on as a society yet - it will need our continued energy, creativity, and work for a long time.)

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