music, therapy, and me

It is 6:38 am, and there is a bird chirping loudly and repetitively outside my home. We had a thunderstorm this morning, so everything is wet and somewhat cool outside. There may be more storms in the near future, so I guess the bird is just communicating as much as possible before the next round shows up. I am feeling like I am being a slacker right now, not working, and trying my best not to engage in these feelings of uselessness and FOMO. I want to spend some time upstairs today, sorting through and cleaning up my stuff. I have storage items coming tomorrow to help with that process. I want to be able to walk around my upstairs without having to step over things. I also need to spend some time on marketing and printing out materials for Creativity Camp which will happen next weekend. I also need to take a shower and make my bed with clean sheets. Lots of things I need to do. We will see how much I actually get done today. Yesterday was spent mostly in napping. I worked a bit on one...

Do you ever have times in the year where you find yourself affected by many different things simultaneously? I am two days post-vacation and am missing my family members who are now safely tucked away in their own homes. I still work in a warm room, but my room is a bit cooler than it has been for sometime now. I have an itchy neck area - I think I have a rash there that I will need to treat with my old ointment. It is not currently very hot here, but the heat will be building through the weekend. I am not feeling very effective in my personal life at the moment. I do not know why I am feeling this way, but it probably has something to do with my summer SAD. I do not enjoy summer much in this area of the world, but it is what it is. I has also taken me lots of time to acknowledge that I do not like how I feel and act during the summer months. I am not doing much to counteract this as far as medication goes, but I am doing things to help me keep going through the heat and the humidity t...

There is something challenging about being awake after only four hours of sleep for the second day in a row that just makes me crabby. I have already been up for four hours, and it is only 3:37 am right now. I still have two and a half hours before I absolutely have to head out to work, and I have already written a private post to this blog. That one will not be published. This one will. I am exhausted. I am currently in a depressive state which is complicated by the high heat in my area of the world and exacerbated by my recent bout of COVID. I am tired. I am crabby. I am magnifying small things into huge things and devoting too much of my attention to these small things. I know all these things. Being conscious of these things helps me to move forward and through these feelings and emotions and actions. I know that the actions of others have NOTHING to do with me, but I tend to take their actions personally. I am stepping up my mantras and my reality checks. I have six more work days...

I am sitting here, at 4:30 am, after my shower, starting to ruminate on what is going on in my life right now. I am struggling with feelings of being overwhelmed, exhausted, anxious about things, and having to catch my breath all the time. I realized that this pattern is one that I have been through before, so I am going to write about it yet again... I woke up this morning at 2:38. Since I was wide awake, I headed to the bathroom and as I was walking to the bathroom, I heard running water. At first, I thought it might be rain, so I moved to the bathroom, did what I had to do, and heard no rain sounds. That was odd, so I veered from my path back to my bed and followed the sound. I found my kitchen faucet going full blast! The scrubber holder that I had hung on the porous tile of my backsplash had fallen down, hitting the toggle knob and starting the water. Fortunately, the drain and sink were clear, so the water was just draining, but I have no idea how long this had been the case. I w...

I am at the beginning of my Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) cycle. This is a part of my life that happens every year, and it seems to be related completely to the hot, humid life that occurs around me at this time. I was able to stave off some of the symptoms because we had a nice long spring, but summer is here in its humid, buggy, unpredictable glory, so I can feel things starting to take over. My SAD has lots to do with my difficulty breathing during these conditions, I am sure. I have chronic headaches, bad asthma, and lots of lethargy. I let things pile up and doing stuff is difficult. I try to minimize the humidity but it is a lost cause around here. I am going to buy a dehumidifier because (duh) that might help with my breathing. Anyway, to combat some of these feelings, I am trying a bit of silliness and some socialization. I went to Topeka yesterday, our capitol city, and a place that I avoid like the plague because I get lost there very easily - for some strange reason. I c...

Yesterday, I sat down and wrote a long post about how I was feeling depressed and burned out completely with even the thought of having to work. I didn't publish it because there are times when my writing is just too raw for me to share. I left my home under a waning moon and drove to work. During my drive, I had a grief moment overtake me, so I was sobbing about the last Christmas and how my Dad cried when I gave him some computer speakers (because he knew he was dying and I think he realized he would never get to use those speakers), and it overwhelmed me. It still does as I am sitting here crying as well. I am not sleeping well and everything just seems to pile up until I can't move. Then I got to work. I slogged through my documentation for five groups and the individual session that I did on Tuesday, prepared myself for my two groups of leading and the three groups that my intern is currently taking over (but hasn't completely moved into leadership so I still have to a...

Getting older is no joke. Now, if you aren't of "a certain age," then this post may not make much sense to you now, but it will eventually make a bit of sense when you start to feel that age is a contributing factor in the decisions that you make for yourself and those around you. I have spent the last week in the midst of perimenopausal emotion swings and angst and hysterical sobbing and a complete an utter failure to be able to focus on things outside of myself. My emotions, combined with personal grief, incapacitated me in my role as a therapist. I was not able to engage in therapy and so I spent my session time engaging clients in passive music experiences rather than challenging them in their goal areas. I had to do this due to my own instability and fragility. I took some time away from sessions because I didn't want to cry in front of my clients. I'm not comfortable sharing that part of myself with them. Right or wrong, it was the decision that I made for m...

It is Wednesday, right?? I have four days after today to get myself organized and get back to work for a full-time schedule of music therapy groups, attempts to get individuals going, and shepherding two interns through the process of becoming their own type of therapist. Yesterday was a total loss as far as doing anything productive for how I live my life in my home. I woke up feeling blue and restless. Nothing appealed to me at all, so I headed out to my local Walmart for a shopping spree. I had to be around people - not so much to interact, but just to be around others. I wore my mask, practiced appropriate social distancing, and all that, and I left spending just under $100. It took me about 45 minutes to make the rounds of the store, and I did get SOME things that I need - for example, some new storage containers for my stuff at work - the old ones are disintegrating - and, of course, several things that I really didn't need - four new fiction books to devour in the next week ...

I am spending exorbitant amounts of time these days staring at my blog page, wondering what I am going to write about. Nothing seems to be very interesting to me, and I end up just writing a little bit and then I delete it all. This is the fourth start I've made this morning - everything else has fizzled after two paragraphs. I'm in a depressive cycle right now, and it has lots to do with compassion fatigue and burnout. Today I have to confront some co-workers who overstepped their authority last week in a way that complicates my role at my facility, and I'm dwelling on that confrontation. I've agonized over what I want to say all weekend. It's ridiculous that this situation has taken over my brain and body in a way that has affected everything else that I've been doing, but it has. I'm not sure if I'm anxious about this situation or if I'm anxious and my brain has grasped onto this situation to expel that anxiety. It's quite the quandary - y...

I'm really sorry if you arrived at this blog, looking for something about trauma-informed care today. I cannot do it. Not this week. There is so much trauma being inflicted on innocent people these days that it seems to permeate every bit of my existence. Being prone to depression during these hot, humid, sunny days of summer, I am having to be more proactive about my moods than usual. I find myself in complete exhaustion all the time these days - some of that due to allergy reactions, some of that because it is difficult to feel motivated, some of that because I seem inherently lazy. As much as I try, I cannot seem to escape the headlines of separation, trauma, and nasty interactions between people these days. Does it seem to anyone else that we are just turning mean and egocentric? Who cares if we hurt someone else as long as #1 is taken care of?? "I'm right and will always be right. There is no need for facts - my opinions are all that there is! If you disagree, the...

I have tried to start this post several times today. I was sitting in my parents' family room, next to my sister, trying to write something that would represent what I feel on the brink between the old and new years. It just wasn't coming then. I feel that it is coming now - kinda like how nausea indicates that something unpleasant is happening - I hope this isn't that unpleasant, but no promises. 2016 was difficult for many of us in the world. I faced big personal and professional challenges and disappointments. Others lost parents, children, loved ones. There were shootings, hateful actions towards others, and a general feeling of disconnection with many different things including government and each other. We lost many icons in the world of entertainment. Things did not seem to go as planned for many of us out here in the world. 2016 is going to be over pretty soon, for all of us. 2017 holds the best gift of all - an uncertain future. Who knows what the world will ...

Every so often, I have to work a 12-hour day in my role as a school-based music therapist. I dread those days with a passion, primarily because I spend most of the day sitting in my small, dark music therapy room with occasional breaks for (shudder) team-building exercises, and then I end up sicker than a dog afterwards. I've been able to avoid most of our 12-hour days this year because administration scheduled them on Wednesdays - I have another job on Wednesday evenings, so I get to work flex time rather than going through the rigor of 12-hour days. We've finished three of our five 12-hour days in the first three months of school - only two more to go. This last day, the one where I did most of the 12-hours (but not all - I left after 11 hours because I felt sick and had already worked overtime that week), left me exhausted. I slept in until 7:30 yesterday morning and 7:00 this morning. My allergies are morphing into something else - at this point, I can't tell if it ...

I am a fan-girl of Jenny Lawson, AKA the Bloggess. She is an irreverent, interesting, and profane writer who focuses on writing memoirs about her life in Texas as well as in the world. She's written two books, Let's Pretend This Never Happened and the brand-new, not quite released Furiously Happy . I can't explain why I like her so much, so I'll just link you to her blog. BEFORE I DO THAT, THOUGH... Please be aware that she uses profanity lots and lots. If that's not your particular brand of entertainment (it's not usually mine), then you may not want to click on the link. She talks lots about depression, anxiety disorders, and many other social issues. You may not agree with everything you read... make your own decisions about what you want to read about and what you don't. She likes pets and has several - she's a cat person, but has recently added a dog to her family. She also likes really bad taxidermy. Through the writing of Jenny Lawson...