music, therapy, and me

It is my season for thinking about what comes next for me. This year has been especially challenging due to leaving the worlds of church and internships within a couple of months of each other. I am faced with less income and more time - things that are both good and not so good. So, my natural period of reflection and planning is laced with thoughts about finding more money and using the time I have from this current iteration of my body and mind. I am not struggling with my current salary, but more money is always nice. I am also going to have to pay quite a bit for some medical procedures this year, so extra money would be good for me. I feel that I have some options, but it will mean breaking a habit of needing to crash as soon as I get home from my 7-3 job. The big question for today is "where do I feel I need to be?" Lately, something that has bothered me for most of my career has been expressed by someone else, so it has come to the forefront of my brain again. It is t...

Yesterday, I decided that my inspirational messages needed to change a bit. I have two tchotchkes on my desk that include inspirational quotations. In addition, I have a tarot card reading application on my Kindle that is fun to use. I needed to change what I see every morning, so I started with the Kindle app and then moved through my easel thingy and my box of quotations to see what messages are out there for me. The Kindle app pulled the card - visualization - and then told me that it is time to manifest my dreams through visualizing them and then making them come true. Okay, that is a great message to take with me into an escrow situation and the dream of owning a home pretty darn soon! All the way to work yesterday, I visualized a smooth therapy day with limited need for attention to other things happening. I also visualized my room the way I want it to be. I focused on the arrival of my new cabinet (spoiler - it hasn't arrived yet), but when I arrived in the doorway to my roo...

I didn't run any music therapy sessions yesterday because I moved my intern and myself and all my junk into the storage closet. You see, some short-sighted administrators (who have all left under mysterious circumstances now) decided that we didn't need any extra office space in the education area and gave that away to the clinical team and now we need that office space back but every single nook and cranny is full to the brim of stuff, including my room, but since I have three separate storage areas (2 offices and the closet which I only spread things into in January), I was expected to be a "team player" and allow people to be constantly tramping through my music therapy sessions for the "good of the team." Now, I have lived with the "people tramping through" situation for several years, and I HATE IT! I decided to make things fall the way I wanted them to fall. I approached my new principal (not one of the short-sighted) and told him that I knew...

I am probably not going to be writing lots on my blog for a bit - and here's why... I am currently having to navigate something that has only happened once before with me, and that is a life-changing injury. The last one was a total ACL repair on my left knee, and this one is a tendon tear in my left hand middle finger. I'm not going to share how this happened, it is not relevant, but I am currently wavering between "it will all be okay" and "I'll never be able to play the guitar again!" I think this will come out the former rather than the latter, but those pesky other thoughts keep bursting into my head! While there is never a good time for something like this, the timing of this situation has hit me hard. I now hove to figure out how to juggle a new intern, a current intern, AND my job in a way that will be able to fit around surgery, recovery, and rehabilitation. I have to find someone who can drive me to my appointments, and I have to figure all of ...

Do you remember all the posts that were coming across social media about how rough 2019 was for many of us and how much we were looking forward to the new start that was 2020? I do, and I long for those naive days when 2020 seemed to be a big step forward into life. Little did we all know that 2020 would be what it is now. Since it is now July and quarter three, I've been sitting down to do some things that I do pretty much every quarter. I sit down to make goals for myself and evaluate my progress on the goals for the previous quarter. This quarter also coincided with filling up my old bullet journal, so all of this planning and evaluation is happening in my new journal - the one I'm designing for myself. What have I learned from doing this exercise?? I am great at establishing goals but LOUSY at working towards them at all! I always have really sound and appropriate goals written down for myself, but I rarely make any progress on them at all. I am constantly making grandiose ...

Just so you know, this isn't a happy, peppy, rah-rah type of music therapy post. I am going through some rough times at my job. If you are looking for a glimpse into the reality of being a music therapist, please read on. If you only want to hear happy things about this profession, then PLEASE skip this post entirely! Yesterday was another rough day with my clients. This is the current theme to what I write about because every day seems to be a repetition of the bad day that came before it. On days like today, when I am dreading going to my particular work place, I have to remind myself of several things. First, this, too, shall pass. Second, it is not personal. Third, I choose, every day, to work with persons with these particular challenges.  Fourth, it is work that I am very good at. I have to remind myself of these things on a regular basis these days because of the rough situations happening in every class session that is going on right now. I had three people st...

In the past two weeks, I've had very few positive sessions at my facility. My students are struggling, our mostly new staff members are struggling, and I am struggling to get anything accomplished. I am feeling like a failure as a therapist because I haven't had a day go by where I wasn't physically assaulted by a client for simply requesting that they remain safe in my therapy space.  Here's the deal, folks. Music therapy is not always comprised of "happy people making happy sounds." There are times when you have to deal with humans at their worst, and it is not fun. These times, though, are the times when music can be most powerful and the role of the music therapist is the most important. Sure, any therapist can enjoy their job when everything is going right, but it takes stamina and realism and dedication to stick with a difficult client during a difficult time! (I currently have about 100 clients going through difficult times, so I am feeling like ...

Dear Fellow Music Therapists, I've been inspired to write due to yet another post on one of my social media feeds. This comment was about supervising folks who display personality traits different from our own, and it started me thinking about "the Perfect Therapist." You know the one. That therapist who is running a business, juggling home responsibilities, presenting at every single conference, looks like he/she is in control of all parts of his/her life, and who makes the rest of us feel like we are wanna-bes. I know many of those types of folks and have been that type of person for others (I know that), but I've also realized that there is no such thing as "the Perfect Therapist." I think we all have expectations for ourselves that we do not live up to. At least, I know that I have these expectations for myself. When I was a new therapist, I kept hearing about the wonderful things that one peer in particular was doing - she was building a music t...

I decided that I rant enough to warrant a new visual!! I am a member of several music therapy groups over on Facebook, and I keep noticing that there is a huge disconnect between employers and potential employees. I spend lots of my quiet time (and there is LOTS of that right now) thinking about this miscommunication or misalignment or whatever is actually happening and wondering if there is a way to bring the two parties together a bit more than they are right now. Here's the deal. There are wonderful music therapy employers out there who cannot find music therapists to fill jobs. There are music therapists out there (I don't know them, so I can't decide whether they are wonderful or not) who lament that they cannot find a job. The solution seems easy to me, but I know that it isn't all that easy. When I'm asked about the music therapy job market, I state that there are plenty of jobs out there (and I do believe this is true), but that you have to go where ...

There's nothing quite like writing a paragraph and then deleting it...over and over and over again. I've started six posts this morning and have lost interest in each one of them before I got the second paragraph finished. My father calls me every night. Our conversations tend to go the same way. He asks me what is happening, and I respond, "Nothing really. The cat is..., and work is..., and I'm feeling..." Then, he asks about the weather several times, and we are finished. Nothing much changes in my routine. It's just what it is - pretty routine. I'm spending time trying to flesh out my routine - making it more. I'm tired of doing the same old thing, so it is time to figure out something else. I changed my bullet journal routine a little bit this past week. I added a monthly goal spread. Whoo-hoo! Way to shake up the routine, right? (Intense sarcasm here) I have a goal for myself and for a product release that I want to accomplish by the 15th ...