TME Tuesday: Forgetting Old Favorites
We used to have massive paper ball fights in the gymnasium. We would take all the recycling, cut it in half, and then encourage our students and staff members to crumple it up and then engage in a battle royale! We would go until we were tired, and then we would time ourselves as we cleaned up all the snowballs into bags. We would then stack the bags into snowmen as we sang winter songs. I miss those days.
These days, my clients are not able to be safe with themselves or with others to handle a snowball fight of any sort.
I have been spending some time steeped in nostalgia lately. I am not sure why, but I know part of it is being tired of work situations. I have been thinking about the things that I used to be able to do with my students without the possibility of complete meltdowns.
I think I used to be more fun.
Am I stuck in patterns? Is this my fault? Are my clients that different from those before? Am I no longer a fun person to be around? What are the answers to these questions?
I am in a season of self-examination, I guess.
I find myself missing the songs that I used to sing to my clients and the TMEs we used to have fun with during sessions.
I miss indoor snowball fights.
These days, I am constantly feeling like I am on edge waiting for the next person to scream or try to hurt someone or run out of the room. Half of the school is not interested in being in the music therapy room, and I do not know why everyone hates music at the moment. To be fair to me, the same clients hate everything - not just music therapy - but it seems personal because that's how I am experiencing it. I am finding it difficult to separate my feelings from the responses that my clients are showing me right now.
About a year ago, I found a blog post from a now stagnant blog called Museum 2.0. (I call it stagnant because the last post was in 2022.) It was called, "Disinterested or Excluded?" This has been something that I have been thinking about...lots!
I feel that many of my clients are disinterested, and I am not sure what to do to get them interested.
It is time to sit down and look through my TME files to see what is there that I can do with my current clients. I am hoping that I will have ways to interest my students in music therapy in the new year. We will see if this has been a seasonal thing or if it is something that is part of the clients that we are currently accepting to our facility.
It is time to go to work to do some more thinking. Thanks for reading.
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