music, therapy, and me

Creativity Camp is finished, so it is time for my next projects! I tend to do this to myself, but I enjoy having several projects going at the same time. In addition to meetings and conferences, I have some written projects to produce. All of this as I try to figure out if I have enough ideas to sustain my life as a music therapy consultant with a small business. It has been almost a month since I retired from my full-time job as a music therapist in a psychiatric residential treatment facility school. I have not received my first pension payment yet - it is due to arrive in nine days - so, I am currently running my life on my savings. I am paying lots of money for my health insurance, and I am nervous about how I will survive financially during the next couple of months, but I am trying to sustain a new quiet life. One where I can create, interact, support, and benefit fellow music therapists from my home with a bit more freedom than my recent job offered. In 17 days, we will be gathe...

In a week and a half, I will be the only inhabitant of my therapy suite. One of my suitemates is retiring, and the other accepted a great, new job and will also be leaving. This will mean that I will have that space all to myself again, and I am in a state of anticipatory grief. I have worked with these co-workers for my entire time at my current job, and I am also getting ready to retire, so there are lots of feelings swirling around and in me at the moment. I find that anticipatory grief is the worst state for me. Knowing that something is going to happen and having to get used to the idea is more difficult than being thrown into grief. (Now, please know that this is my opinion rather than a fact, so you are encouraged to form and express your own opinions about what I say - any time or any topic!) Knowing that my co-workers are leaving is hard to process, especially when I still have to see them for the next week and a half. I have not told my clients that I am retiring from this jo...

I forgot to take my medications last night until about 2 hours later than usual. These are my big, pain relief, nerve dulling medications that affect my sleep, awareness, and response time, so it is a pretty big deal when I forget them. I opened my eyes when the alarm light turned on at 4am, but I also did not get out of bed until almost 5am. My brain is still fuzzy, and my eyes don't focus right until the medication starts to wear off. So, that means that today will be an even later day. Today is a four-group day. Three of my four groups have already been with me this week, so I have to come up with something new for them to do when they are in the music therapy session. The other group is my once-per-week group, so they haven't explored any of the things that I have available right now - yet. So, the first thing that I have to do is to figure out what I am going to do with my clients. They went through a series of silly songs with me on Tuesday, so I am thinking I will bring ...

It is Wednesday morning - very early. I have not been sleeping as much as I like lately. This will be helpful next Sunday when my part of the world changes to Daylight Savings Time (ugh!), but it is not really helpful right now. Last night, things were complicated by high winds and blizzardy conditions at my home. Things were wuthering all over the place, and my neighbors have a trash bin in their backyard that had a banging lid each time the wind caught it. (The wind caught it many times!) The one good thing about this particular blizzard is that my power has not gone out... yet. I am really hoping that I will not have to go out into the high winds, but schools are not closing around here. I will plan on going really slowly as I travel the 50 miles to work this morning. The winds are going at 30 miles per hour with gusts every couple of seconds that are around 60 miles per hour. I have a little car that catches every piece of wind that is out there. My job is located in a place where ...

I am thinking that it is time for a soul-searching type of post. I am struggling with things that are happening in our world, and I believe that every person has to come up with their own way of dealing with these things. However, I also have very strong opinions about what is right and what is wrong. I am trying to reconcile myself to the things that I am drawn to do and the ways that I can respond to things outside of my home. I have to get back to what I believe, so here I go. I believe that every person deserves the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. I believe that every person is valuable. I believe that every person has the ultimate right to decide what makes them happy in their time on this earth. I believe that there needs to be structure and boundaries in society to protect those who are unable to protect themselves from those who feel that they can control how others live their lives. I believe that we are the product of evolution, and I can recognize that ...

I am thankful that this week is almost over. Not because of any one thing happening, but just because I need some time away from holding the anger of clients who will not be celebrating holidays with people that they love. I need some time to shed the despair of children who do not understand why they can't go home when they want to go home. I also need to rest up for the sessions next week and the continuation of all of these feelings for the next month. There is something humbling when you realize that you are a safe space for big emotions. I had this realization yesterday when a client became very angry because I turned down the amplifier that was starting to crackle. This client requires very little to get angry, and the anger turns into disruption and aggression really quickly. This is the second week in a row that I was the reason for an emotional outburst while in music therapy. I finally had the thought that music therapy is a safe space to express emotion, and that helped ...

It is Monday again, and I am wiped out! There is just something about May that just makes me feel disjointed. At this moment, I have a Talent Show to coordinate, graduation music to provide, a school-wide carnival to work through, and then a day of school district schmoozing and training to survive before a week of medical testing before our extended school year starts up. So, this is a busy time of year, and I am feeling the pinch just like I always do. I am still in the process of deciding about my internship program. I have six incomplete applications in my files at this moment. No applicant has completed their application except for one who did not want to pursue the internship. I have one application for January 2025, but it is also not complete. I am hoping that I will get a completed application really soon so I can move forward with the process of evaluation, audition, and interview. We will see what will happen. This application situation makes me wonder what is going on, and ...

I fell down a rabbit hole yesterday  morning during my extra preparation hour (which I have right now because we do not have all of our classrooms open). I started doing some music therapy thesis and dissertation exploration. I'm not really sure why I started all of this - my brain isn't fully awake at the moment, and I have a big headache, so things are not the best for remembering or thinking, but I found a couple of articles and dissertations that pulled me into reading.  One of them, by Rebecca Warren, intrigued me enough to have me go through most of it in the hour that I had available to me. The title, Examining Ableism in Music Therapy Education and Clinical Training: Student and Educator Perspectives , was interesting (full citation at the end of this post). I am someone who has done some studying about universal design and universal design learning, and I want to be someone who demonstrates the acceptance of all humans, so I am often interested in titles that include ...

Today's Sentimental Sunday post is the most viewed post on my blog - ever, and I am glad that I happened upon this one in my morning perusal on this Spring Forward Sunday. Here it is - the 7 things I wish someone had told me about music therapy post.  The sad thing about this post is that I think we still do not talk about these things much in the music therapy world. It has been almost 10 years since I wrote this first post and not much changes in the world of music therapy...ever. I still think that we, as a profession, are on a precipice.  We have to do better, as a collective group of professionals, at preparing our future professionals for this life. I am reading through the report of the commission for the 21st century group very slowly. My initial reaction is that what I have read is very similar to what was recommended 10 years ago, but I haven't delved into things the way I should before I start to talk about it all.  I am frustrated with how long it takes to ge...

When I first started TME Tuesdays, I wanted to share ideas and get comments and interact with other music therapists who were interested in providing music therapy ideas and experiences with clients that were new and different. I wanted to create community, but then I got cranky. When I was a part of Music Therapists [Aren't] United  (the additional word is completely mine and mine alone), one of the people posting went on a rant about gatekeeping and how music therapists should just give things away to younger music therapists rather than expecting to be paid for TME ideas, visual aids, business advice, etc. I got angry at that because I feel that we should be paid for the work that we do. I don't believe that I should give away my hard work to everyone and anyone just because they feel that they want to take it. There is a difference between sharing with someone and someone just taking from you without reciprocation. That is when I stopped publishing my therapeutic music expe...

I woke up a bit later than I usually do (for the second day in a row), and I started my blogging routine after checking email and fiddling around with social media and all that. Going to my blog archive and starting up the random number generator is just something that I enjoy, so it was fun to get started with all of this today. The random number generator spat out the number #2281. This led me to a post from September 16, 2019, titled "What Do I Really Want?"  I always find it interesting to see what I was thinking back when. This one is a good reminder of things that I am working on right now. My word for 2019 was "courage." I selected a second word as well; "renewal." This post is a bit of a revealing discourse about me and some of my attitudes towards things that happen in the music therapy world and things that happen in my own life. I tend to go into periods of reflection and self-recrimination, and this seems to be me on the verge of this thing. As...

Today is my first day of winter break for 2023, and I allowed myself to go back to sleep (fortunately, without the nightmares that often happen when I go back to sleep) and lay about in bed for a bit longer than usual. I am now up and ready to start the next two days of at home break time. The first day of winter break is always a time where I make lots of plans for future me to accomplish. I rarely complete any of those plans. I have things that I need to get done, including cleaning the kitchen. I also need to do laundry, pack a bag, and prepare for the rest of my winter break. I am starting my task list and am getting ready to start things off after I post this essay. Lately, my thoughts have been taken over by thoughts about how people learn. I have really been focused on current music therapy students and interns because that is who I work with in my music therapy job. This is probably going to sound a bit preachy or critical, and I am not going to apologize for that tone - mainly...

This morning, I saw a post about having an indoor snowball fight with kids, and it got me started thinking about things I used to do with my clients that I no longer do. The indoor snowball fight is one of those things. We used to have massive paper ball fights in the gymnasium. We would take all the recycling, cut it in half, and then encourage our students and staff members to crumple it up and then engage in a battle royale! We would go until we were tired, and then we would time ourselves as we cleaned up all the snowballs into bags. We would then stack the bags into snowmen as we sang winter songs. I miss those days. These days, my clients are not able to be safe with themselves or with others to handle a snowball fight of any sort. I have been spending some time steeped in nostalgia lately. I am not sure why, but I know part of it is being tired of work situations. I have been thinking about the things that I used to be able to do with my students without the possibility of compl...

It is Friday, December 8, 2023, and I am in a self-reflective mode. I have been properly awake for just over an hour now, so I have spent some time thinking and looking around my office area. I can see my current self-employment quests posted on the wall next to pictures of my father. I can see my covered crafting desk where I have not been able to craft for the past several months due to my finger injury. I am rewatching Hilda  on Netflix - a show that I enjoy. I am in a mood at the moment that encourages me to sit and think. It is time. There are many things to think about. I am ignoring as much of the news as I can - it is pretty easy to do. I know that being aware of things is good, but there comes a point where it is not healthy to only hear about the ways humans hurt each other. I reach that point very quickly, so I tend to avoid hearing the news. I read articles, but I do not watch or listen. This helps me think about the things that I can affect. I am thinking about work. I...

I have entered the season of boredom as an internship supervisor - the intern is doing their full caseload, and I am on light duty. These two things are combining to my time during every intern's time with me where I am no longer "therapist" for the group but am "lady sitting in that room, occasionally yelling things." This is not my favorite time as a music therapist, let me tell you! I am on the brink of making some decisions about my internship program. I am not sure that my program can sustain two interns at the same time anymore. We have recently lost another classroom, so we now serve our client caseload in eleven groups. This is down from fifteen groups four years ago. Since the pandemic, we have not been able to have a full census due to lack of staff members, so our school has shrunk as well. In addition, our population is not an easy one to work with, so our teachers are moving on to new jobs in other districts where there is more funding and better st...