music, therapy, and me

I am going to do something that I rarely do on this blog. I am going to talk about politics, safety, and fear. I do not like delving into politics (especially) in any public forum because I feel that my opinions about political figures and systems are private and not open to argument, but I've been crying all morning about the school shootings in Uvalde, Texas, and I need to process all of these emotions in a way that will help me sort through my thoughts. I am scared. I am mourning. I am angry. My sister is heading to her school this morning for the last two days of her school year. It is a tradition that the local fire station comes over, gives the kids a discussion about fire safety, and then squirts the kids with the trucks. I am scared that she will be standing outside with her students. I am scared that she will have to be huddled in her classroom. I am scared that she will have to protect the students in her school in a way that might take her from my family. I am more scare...

I did it. I missed an important, self-imposed deadline, and I just didn't even think about it coming up at all until after the deadline had passed and I realized that it was gone... I hate that. I hate it when I miss things, especially things that are tied to a deadline. Now, my mess up is not horrible nor is it something that will ruin me, but it did make me stop and think a bit about what types of things I have been focusing on lately. My missed deadline was a direct function of not looking in my book - where the deadline is prominently displayed on yesterday's date!! So, I sent out an email to folks last night, apologizing for my mistake and promising the completed project by tomorrow morning. That gives me a bit of breathing room, but not too much. I have a fear of letting others down - comes from being a perfectionist with a strong work ethic, I guess. I get very disappointed in myself when I miss deadlines (like I did today), even when others probably didn't notice. I...

I am heading to the hand specialist again today to get more x-rays and to see if I can move from immobilization to rehabilitation of the two distal phalanx joints that were damaged in a work incident on August 24th. I have been in splints all the time since, trying hard to do my job in a way that keeps the integrity of music therapy happening but with extreme limits on what I could do musically. I am hoping that this is the appointment where I get to move from splints to strengthening and recovery. For the past two and a half months, I have been unable to use my fingers in any manner that would support playing either the piano or the guitar. The injury that I sustained was a tendon tear in my left middle finger (also known as mallet finger) and a fracture in my left ring finger. From what I've read (because...well...that's what you do when you get an actual diagnosis...you go on WebMD to find out more), I have been in splints a bit longer than most people are in these cases. I ...

Oh, it is happening again. I am staring at my screen, avoiding a task that I have to get done here but that I am scared to do. It is something that I've been dreaming about for a couple of weeks now, but I have to get it done. It is due tomorrow, so the time crunch is on now. It has to be finished by this evening so I can upload it all. Have I even opened it up yet?? Nope. I have been taking every excuse I can to avoid sitting down and just doing this! It is time to get over my fear of failure and get going! A friend of mine posted a quote from Aaron Sorkin that struck a chord with me in my current state - “You call it procrastinating. I call it thinking.” – Aaron Sorkin. There comes a time, though, when thinking is taken over by fear - at least in my case. I think some of my procrastination is definitely affected by fear. I don't want to produce a substandard product, so I don't even want to try. My emotional brain is fully behind this fear. It lives in the space between w...

At the beginning of this year, I selected a word to act as a focus tool. I wrote it in my start of the year 2019 pages and have added some notes about what this means to me since then. I also added a graphic on the other page that exemplified this particular word to me. In the picture, there is a stylized person standing on the edge of a cliff which is labeled "What We Are." There is a gap and another cliff. The gap is labeled "Leap of Faith" and the other cliff is labeled "What We Want to Be." (I do not know who the original artist is, so I'm not going to put a picture of this graphic here on my blog - I insist on being able to source all materials presented! It's a copyright thing, you know!) The graphic really spoke to me since the person standing on the cliff is looking down over the cliff into that leap of faith. I very much identify with that lonely figure at the edge of "What We Are." I took another leap of faith yesterday when...

I'm tired. I'm sick and tired and want something to change. I don't want to live in fear every time I walk into my school job. I don't want there to be signs on the door that say that we prohibit weapons. I don't want to have to attend active shooter training (which gave me intense and horrible anxiety dreams) in order to learn that there is really nothing that I can do in the case of an active shooter in my school. I am tired of it all. We're told so many conflicting things about situations like the latest in Florida. We get told that it's not the fault of the manufacturers, it's not the fault of the people who make regulatory laws about gun ownership, it's not the fault of such and such. We're told that the person who acted was an individual who chose to take advantage of the loopholes, technicalities, and FREEDOM that we are offered in this country. There will be an assumption that the person who acted was mentally ill, and there will be som...

Yesterday, a good friend of mine collapsed in the middle of a church service. This good friend is also the pastor, and he got really sweaty, somewhat disoriented, and had difficulty with his balance. He wasn't slurring his words, but he fainted once and was caught by two of the younger men of the congregation. Fortunately, there were enough of us to bully him into going to the emergency room rather than staying around to do Sunday school. He really wanted to stay for his class and for the second service. We insisted that he go. Turns out, he has a bladder infection.  He scared me. Here was a person that I cared about who was in distress, and I was scared that he was having a stroke or a heart attack - I felt like it more stroke-like rather than heart problems. I was scared for him and for his wife. I was confronted once about not wanting to take courses about working as a hospice music therapist. I stated that I was unable to handle the subject matter, and I was ridiculed by ...

Today is Tuesday, and I am going into work to go through active shooter training. This is not something I want to do or something that I am looking forward to, but it seems to be the norm these days if you work in a school. Our scenario will include police officers roaming around the building, shooting blanks, and hunting us. I am having anxiety dreams and nothing has happened yet. This is the environment of my worst dreams usually, being chased by people who are out to get me, and today, I get to live it. My rational brain knows the reason behind this training. Schools are vulnerable to attack by people who have several different agendas. It is unfortunate that this is the case, but it is. Schools contain vulnerable and protected people (the future) and have a huge impact on idea development and subsequent actions. School attacks make statements, so we who work in schools have to learn how to keep the children in our care safe and alive. My rational brain knows why we are going to d...

I am starting to fill up the gaps in my music therapy schedule with individual music therapy treatment times. This is a great feeling. I'll start individual treatment on July 11th when we come back for our second session of our Extended School Year. I'll get things going for three weeks, reevaluate, and then start up again when the regular school session starts. I am excited about getting back into this type of therapy. I've missed it, but there's something else going on. I'm a bit scared. You would think that my 23+ years of being a therapist would make things lots easier for me to jump back into this type of therapy interaction, but I am a bit scared still. I think most of these feelings have to do with forced light duty and almost a year of being out of my comfortable routine. I know that some of these feelings are rooted in fears of being hurt again. I don't want to be hurt again. I know that many of these feelings are somewhat irrational, but they sti...

I spend quite a bit of time thinking (more these days since I am STILL on light duty due to my recovering knee) and have found that I am in a state of flux as a therapist. This happens to me every so often during my career and is never a bad thing. I believe that every music therapist (actually, every therapist - music or other) has to go through periods of self-examination and change in order to survive the rigors of the job. I also think that these times can either make or break a career. How I progress will help me to determine if and where I want to go as a music therapist. Here are the questions I ask myself during these times... Where do I want to be? What do I want to do? What gives me joy right now? What makes me stressed right now? Am I being effective as a therapist? How am I defining "effectiveness?" Do I like my job? Why or why not? What intrigues me in music therapy right now? What is my creativity level? What is my current philosophy of music, ther...

There aren't many things that I'm afraid of in this world, but being close to loud firework displays are one of those things. I remember my first, clear 4th of July memory being under an ocean side display with the sparks raining down on us. I freaked out - probably started crying uncontrollably. I was scared that we were going to catch on fire, and I was a bit dizzy as well - all of those moving lights. My aunt and uncle, who had taken us to the display, figured out that my baby sister, who appeared exhilarated by the fireworks, was completely fine, but I was completely not. So, being good people, they split us up. My aunt took me to the car where we were far enough away that the sparks weren't directly overhead of me, and my uncle stayed with my sister. I remember being able to calm down away from the fireworks before the end of the show. Lots of people came by to get to cars, and I remember looking for my sister and Uncle in the crowd. When they did arrive, my sister was...

  Do you ever look back on a situation and wonder why you waited so long to acknowledge the situation? I am recovering from the first major surgery and hospital stay in my life, and I am glad that it is over! I am also glad that the timeline for "fixing" me played out in the best possible way for us all. I am also grateful to the people in my life who told me that I needed to do something very difficult for me, "take advantage" of them. I went into my bowel resection surgery with lots of trepidation. I had anxiety moments filled with scenes where they could not keep me under the anesthesia (did not happen, though I did apparently try to slide off the operating table once), where I awoke with a total colostomy (also did not happen), and where I didn't wake up at all leaving my mother to coordinate my funeral, junk distribution, and cat care. Thankfully, none of that happened, and I am on the mend! This is a good thing as it allows me to deal with the addi...

This has been a strange week filled with anxiety dreams, headaches, and full-time therapy! I am really hoping that all of these things are not related since I love doing full-time therapy and, well, you know... Anyway, I fall into bed exhausted every night and then dream all night long.  This is not typical for me - I rarely remember my dreams. These dreams are directly tied into my work - I am dreaming about being switched from one place to another, about secret meetings, and about needing to be in 14 places at once to get the job finished. It interests me that none of my anxiety dreams have anything to do with my clients or music therapy, but that just indicates to me that music therapy sessions are the things that are right in my life right now. Now, you may be wondering why I'm writing about this. Me, too. This is one of the phenomena that happens when I am not sleeping the way I want - seven straight hours and under lots of covers - I start to obsess about non-issues ...

I am practicing positivity in my life right now. Just in case you don't know, things were pretty rough last year and being positive was difficult. I do not like to be a negative person, so I am actively practicing positivity. I was helped along yesterday by an article on the MSN page, http://living.msn.com/life-inspired/find-happiness-in-unexpected-places . This little article was just enough to continue me on my path towards being happy in my work situation and reminded me that happiness is a learned habit - thanks, amygdala! Much like learning to do anything else, our brain needs practice in being positive. The article states that our brain evolved as a finely tuned instrument for survival. We had to be able to recognize negative or dangerous situations, react to those situations quickly, and engage in our fight/flight response immediately to simply stay alive. As a result, our brains have a tendency to react more strongly to the negative happenings in our lives. We have to ...

Change is difficult. There are currently so many changes going on in my life that my head keeps spinning. I am sure that some of you have the same types of things going on in your lives. Changing ideas, paradigms, and "the way we do this" is often threatening when it is personal. Change is something that must occur. If organisms do not change to accommodate their environment, they do not survive. This is not easier when I am the organism, but I have learned that adaptation is essential. Change requires a completely new perspective. It is important to let go of the old ways and thoughts to be able to be a visionary. Sure, things may be fine as the status quo, but there are times when you have to go back to the beginning and start completely over. This is when the big, audacious, hairy changes start to occur. (FYI: I love the phrase "big, audacious, hairy changes" - it was first introduced to me by Bishop Scott Jones of the Kansas East Conference of the United...

Today, September 11, 2011, is the tenth anniversary of the world trade center bombings. There has been absolutely NO WAY you could escape that fact here in the States. This has been a good thing and a bad thing.  I remember where I was when I heard about the incidents that happened on September 11th. I was in my old music therapy room at my current facility when the school secretary entered the room in a flurry. She told me that the world trade center had been bombed. (Information was a bit spotty in a place with limited internet exposure and no television access - she got her information from the country music station that she could listen to in her room. My room did not pick up many radio stations.) My first response was a simple thought of "again?" The world trade center had been bombed before. As I heard more about what had happened, my thoughts were varied. I went through dismay, surprise, fear, anger, and disgust. (The disgust was from all of the people here in Ka...