Thoughtful Thursday: Professional Responsibility to Others

I applied for a position with an organization about a month ago. The job was supposed to start on January 3rd, but the application deadline was extended until December 30th, so a start date of January 3rd was no longer really realistic. I submitted my information twice because I never received an acknowledgement of my application the first time and was concerned that they had not received it. The next step, once I received an acknowledgement of my application (had to ask for it), was that another person would be moving forward on the process. Since then, absolutely nothing has been communicated. There has been no announcement about anyone else getting the job, but everything has been silent.

This is frustrating for me because I am living in a world of doubt at the moment. I am not good with other people being in charge of aspects of my life. I don't know if I should give up or just continue to hope that this opportunity will come. I have had no interaction with anyone other than the person who had to accept the applications. That is not the person who has to make the decisions. I am reluctant to contact anyone because I don't want to be perceived as a pain, but I need to know what is happening.

I see communication as THE most important element of any successful opportunity. Without communicating information to people who need to know, any organization will not prosper. It will fail. My full-time job has significant communication issues. There are many things that need to be told to the entire group but that information is shared with only a few people. We tend to rely more on gossip than on confirmed fact. It is frustrating to hear that things that directly affect me are happening without someone telling me directly that these things are happening. (That is NOT a good sentence.) Organizations that do not communicate with the people that make up the day-to-day operations cannot survive or thrive.

I am rethinking my desire for this job. If the organization that I applied to work for cannot follow simple courtesies such as acknowledging an application or offering timelines to applicants or providing updates to the members of the organization then I may not want to work for them.

It's just this is my dream job for this organization. I have so many ideas and so many things that I see that need to be adapted and updated and actually done. I do not want anyone else to be doing this. I want it to be me, so I keep going and wondering and debating with myself about whether I keep my application active or not.

Today is a late day because I didn't take my meds until later than usual. I was able to talk to a young man who has some interest in music therapy as a career last night, so we sat down and talked about it all. As a result, I am unable to focus my far vision. It is so much fun.

I like talking about being a music therapist with other people. I try really hard to give them a realistic view of what we do and what it is like. He asked me about salary. I told him that music therapists can expect to make what public school teachers make in their communities. He asked me how much that was. I told him it depended on where you lived. I believe in telling the truth as much as possible. Most music therapists I know get paid the equivalent of a public school teacher with the same number of years of experience - no matter what the population or work situation. That seems to be the best indication of how much money we can expect these days.

We also talked about some of the societal issues that this young man has as a member of the LGBTQIA+ community. I told him that the music therapy community was like every other community - that there are people who support everyone no matter what and there are others who do not. I find, at least in my music therapy friends, more who support everyone no matter what than those who do not. This person is interested in activism and being famous and all sorts of other things. It was interesting to talk to him. Who knows if he is going to actually become a music therapist, but we had a talk about all sorts of things.

Apparently, when I was growing up, I knew a music therapist as well, but I didn't know he was a music therapist. I wish I had spoken to him about his work. I'm not sure where he worked or who he worked with, but it would have been nice to know a bit more about my dream job than what I knew when I started. I had one book, The Music Within You, and a brochure about music therapy as a career choice. That's it. I went into all of this with absolutely no idea if it was something that I wanted, but it was. Piano class nearly pushed me out of the profession more times than I like to admit, but I stuck with it and am still a music therapist 30 years later.

I still can't see much, but I am feeling the itch of moving on with my day. We have three groups and three individuals today. After missing six groups and my dyad session yesterday due to our first snow day of the year, I am looking forward to a quieter couple of days. Fortunately, as part of the service delivery model at my job, I do not have to make up missed sessions. That's one of the benefits of being in an educational enrichment model rather than an IEP-based model. I don't have to scramble to fill up times and organize sessions around everyone else who has to do make up sessions. I just get to use the schedule that is already established for today and tomorrow.

I was able to cross off one element of my OCMT to-do list yesterday. I have more to do, but most of the things on my list are things that I have done for the past eleven years, so they just take time and effort. Hopefully, I will have some energy for some of these tasks this evening. We will see.

I hope that you have a good Thursday.

I am going to try to figure out how to navigate the lack of communication from the opportunity described at the start of this post. I need some more information, so I think asking for that information is appropriate at this point. It's been almost a month since the application deadline and over three weeks since the job was supposed to start. There has been no announcement about anyone else doing the job. I want to know!