Thoughtful Thursday: Still Trying to Find My Way

I am a vintage music therapist.

This is something that I take some pride in because it takes grit and guts and a love for this profession to be able to claim 31 years in this role. It really does. In my career, I have not been able to find a music therapy job in the place I wanted to work, I have had to move for schooling and for work, I have taken pay cuts to move into a music therapy role, I have lived paycheck to paycheck, and I have finally become financially stable and successful. I have lived through significant changes in education and clinical training with our professional organization, and I have volunteered many ideas and hours for that same organization. I am a vintage music therapist.

Being an older music therapist has perks and benefits, but it also has drawbacks. I am a member of Gen X - those latchkey kids who had moms who worked and who had lots of independent hours to fill. We are not easily defined as a group, and that's okay with me. I am also an oldest child of an oldest child of two oldest children (that's as far back as I can go, but I think that there is at least one more oldest child in the next generation), so I was the "responsible" one - I started babysitting my siblings when I was 10 years old, and I was the one who made sure that everyone in the neighborhood walked together after school - that was my job. I got in trouble if someone walked without my supervision. Seriously - I had to write an essay about responsibility in fifth grade when my brother and neighbor walked home by themselves. I want things to work out. I seek compromise whenever possible. 

As a vintage music therapist, I am finding myself very much in a dilemma at the moment. This is not a serious dilemma, by any means, but it is one that continues to challenge me.

I am finding that I cannot be part of any music therapy community right now because of the vitriol that comes out in comments on social media.

A couple of days ago was the anniversary of a huge social media issue for me. I had posted one of my blog entries - it was about things I wish interns knew before they started their internship or something along those lines. As I state in many of my posts, these thoughts and ideas about music, about therapy, about music therapy are all my own. They are my opinions and my experiences. Only mine. I do not monetize these posts because I do not feel like this is something to be tied to likes and views and all that. I want this to be a place where I can divulge my thoughts about this profession. 

Anyway, one person on Music Therapists Unite took offense to my social media post - not to the blog post, but to the fact that I had the gall to post something about an internship. I attempted to engage with the person initially, but this person continued to use my post as a way to promote a completely different agenda, so I disconnected from the conversation - which made this person angry, but I was not going to engage. After about 10 posts back and forth, I stopped responding.

Other music therapists, however, did not stop. By the end of the situation, there were about 700 comments about my initial post and my opinions about being an internship director. Most of them were positive and in support of me and my ideas which was good to see. After this interaction, I stepped away from most of the conversations in that forum. I left MTU after another year or two because I found it to be a cesspool. There you go.

I do not have answers to any type of problem or situation that exists outside my own professional and personal environments. I cannot fix the current societal setting of being outraged by anything and everything that is different from my own held beliefs. All I can do is navigate my own journey and try to find my way.

I hope that our profession will eventually be strengthened by the turmoil that I see under the surface of our organization's information. I hope that we will see the things that we have been through over the past decade as the time when we finally became a bit more united - supporting each other rather than dictating to others what they should say, do, appear like, and all the rot that seems to come out in social media. I hope that we will figure out what a professional organization can and cannot do. I hope that we stop looking to blame a small, not-for-profit organization for things that are not driven or set by the same organization! Those are my hopes for all of us who call ourselves music therapists!!

It is time to go. As always, comments and questions are welcome.