Alternating Between Boredom and Gratitude

I am at the end of my second week of enforced rest and healing after my abdominal surgery at the end of last month. I have two and a half weeks left before I go back to my full-time job as a clinical music therapist at a psychiatric residential treatment facility in the associated school. This "rest" has been something necessary but difficult nonetheless. I do not do a good job of self-entertaining when work is happening without me.

Now don't get me wrong. There are benefits to being out of work at the moment. First, I am able to rest while my body works on healing the connections that have been recently made. Second, I get bored with my own company, and that makes going back to work much easier. Third, it has been many years since I have had this much time off from work, so I am reveling in the opportunity to become this bored. I do better when I am occupied.

Being on an enforced break from work means that my brain is grasping for any sort of thought that it can generate. I am thinking about my future and the options that I have in front of me as well as what I am qualified to do. I am also trying to figure out what I will be doing when I return to work next month but my planning materials are at work. I am not allowed to return until the 28th (the first day of our last break before the start of the '25-'26 school year). I might actually go down there to pick up my planners so I can work on my session strategies.

Once I am allowed back to work, I anticipate that I will have to do some relationship building with my previous clients as well as meeting all of the new clients that will be at the facility. It will be a bit like starting a new job - in three weeks of summer sessions without me, the behavioral health technicians will have changed my routines into their own. I will have to reestablish my expectations and ways of doing things in my music therapy room.

The last time I had surgery with an extended time off was 2019 from November 5th through the end of that month. That was gallbladder surgery. This past surgery was my fourth in my life. I am hoping it will be my last for a very long time. I will have to have annual colonoscopies forever, but these will hopefully keep me from having to go through this surgery again.

Egad! I am bored, bored, and more bored.

I don't go back for three more weeks. What am I going to do with myself? We will see.

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