Thoughtful Thursday: I Have Left the Building...

The regular school year at my facility apparently has started this week. I received a message from a former coworker who expressed that she missed me, and that message both made me happy and sad at the same time.

I have left a position that I owned for 30 years. Of course the next person is not me. Things are different, and that is not a bad thing. It's a good thing to mix things up in the music therapy room every so often. That is one of the reasons that I enjoyed having interns around. I got a glimpse of what other therapists could do with my clients that was different from my own thoughts. I also was able to see when my clients performed as I believed they would in certain therapeutic music experiences (TMEs). It was a luxury to work with other music therapists in my program - one where I had been a consistent element in the facility and school longer than any of my coworkers.

The next person has had three weeks of work time so far. Most of that time would have been taken up with training of all sorts - new employee orientation, school district orientation, physical behavior management training, blood-borne pathogens, abuse/neglect, all sorts of training. I hope that my administrators did not just throw the new music therapist into a full-time schedule immediately. Who knows what has been happening??

I've been trying really hard not to think about it.

The best thing about leaving my job was that I was able to leave of my own accord. I am not ready to finish being a music therapist, but the job that I had was rough on my body and my emotional state all the time. I was able to take advantage of the retirement opportunities offered after 30 years of pension payments and decided to leave this year. I will have to find another job to be able to afford health insurance (which I really need), but I no longer have to work full-time. This is a privilege that I have earned due to my 30 years of work for this situation.

The hardest part of this situation is wanting to keep some ties with the humans that I have worked with for many years but not wanting to be seen as trying to interfere with what is happening there right now. I have not reached out on purpose, and that has been both a good thing and a not so good thing in my life. I have tried really hard not to think about the clients going to music therapy without me, but it is a hard habit to break when your entire life revolved around work for a very long time.

One of the interesting things that I have found about this entire process is that I get very defensive when someone mentions that my career is over. My career is NOT over, and I get angry when someone says things like that in front of me! It is almost a visceral response to those words, and it baffles me. Someone actually said, "at the end of your career" to me, and I responded rather bluntly, "I am not at the end of my career!" The speaker was older than I am!

Anyway, it is time to get my groceries (love the ability to get groceries at 8am on a Thursday) and get going with my day. See you!

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