This is a monster of a story, so I'll probably break it up into a few posts.
People who have previously been reading my blog and/or who know me well know that I lost my previous job as a music therapist up in Idaho, and then spent a few unsuccessful months of job hunting while unemployed in my parent's basement.
It was a rough time for a few reasons, not the least of which being that I felt like the worst stereotype of millennials.
Job hunting was... frustrating, to say the least. To start out there was an amazing opening at an elementary school for special education students here in the Salt Lake Valley-- the timing couldn't have been more perfect, they opened up for applications just a few weeks after I left Boise-- but another applicant got the job. Another place I applied to-- this one much farther afield, out in California, called me back to tell me that while they were hiring music therapists (and had posted the job on the American Music Therapy Association website), it wasn't actually a music therapy position at all-- it was some completely different kind of therapy that the owner had come up with. One or two places got back to me that they wanted someone with a Masters' Degree.
The rest of the places I applied to? Never got a response at all.
I reached the point where I'd applied to every job opening in the Western United States, which left me in something of a dilemma. If I wanted to keep trying to be a music therapist, I'd need to start looking farther afield-- to the mid-west, the east coast, etc-- which would mean being far away from my family. And would also mean some complicated apartment hunting, not to mention the job interviews-- so many places insist on an in-person interview, and I've never heard of a music therapy practice successful enough to be able to reimburse applicants for the flight. I was already three steps away from completely broke after my time in Idaho so that was a huge risk. But my only other option was to just give up on being a music therapist and try to find some other kind of job.
Well, not quite my only other option.
After a lot of prayer, and a lot of thought, I decided to do something much riskier than flying across the country for a job that I may or may not get. I decided to open up a private practice.
Now, this was a truly terrifying prospect. I'd just lost my job at a private practice, so I was well aware of the fact that they are not necessarily stable employment. And while I'd put years of study and practice into learning how to be a music therapist, I had never really learned anything about running a business. (Heck, at the rate things are going, it's more like I'm 'walking a business'. And I'm walking very, very slowly)
But there was no way I was going to just give up on being a music therapist. I don't give up easy, not when it really matters. I've given a lot to get to where I am, and I wasn't going to walk away.
I was, however, going to sign up for an online class on running a music therapy business (which helped a lot in making sure I knew all the right forms to fill out and other important steps). I was also going to need a side job. I needed some kind of income, in part because even while living in my parent's basement is the cheapest of housing I still needed to pay for gas and health insurance and other essentials, and partly because-- opening up a business is really expensive. Like, I had no idea. Licenses and declarations and website hosting fees and domain names and I can't even remember all what, I was just paying for everything.
Let's put it this way-- if running a business has taught me anything, it's this: If you're paid to work, you're an employee. If you work for free, you're a volunteer. If you pay to work, you're an entrepreneur.
I told myself that I never ever ever wanted to work retail again after my time spent working at Walmart, so I tried to find a part-time job that was at least in a related field. And it actually wasn't too difficult-- in less than a week of searching, I had an interview at a vocational training facility for adults with developmental disabilities.
Except when I got there I found out they wanted me for a management position-- which made sense, I suppose, because I already had a degree in a related field, even though I've never been any kind of manager. I had to turn them down (there was no way I could take that job load and still run a business of my own), but they were willing to let me apply to an entry-level position (ie the only real requirement was a high school degree).
The job I ended up getting was working graveyard shifts as a "residential trainer". Basically, this meant that I would spent three nights a week at a duplex rented by four women with various developmental disabilities. I'd clean, change the cat's litter-box, do laundry-- and try to stay awake so that if someone had a seizure or needed help getting up and going to the bathroom I'd be right there to help out. In the mornings I'd help everyone get dressed, take their meds, get breakfast, and get onto the bus on time to get to work. Then I'd go home and get some sleep myself.
I figured it was a good opportunity, since Idaho taught me that "prime-time" for private practice was weekends and late afternoons (when parents and kids would be most available for therapy sessions), which this job left open. And I genuinely liked the women I was working with, even though some of them could be a bit crotchety. But, heavens, I had no idea just how awful graveyard shift was. Even though I only worked three days a week, I spent the rest of the week trying to recover from working eleven hour shifts. I got awful insomnia, trying to sleep when the sun was up. Still, it was a decent job and I needed the money, so I hung in there.
Then one evening I got up to find an answering machine message from the morning before-- on the phone number I'd set up for my business. A woman was looking for a music therapist to work with her 97-year-old father, who had dementia, and when she'd googled "South Jordan Music Therapist" I'd been the first name to pop up. (Thank you, SEO Wizard!)
So I picked up my first client, a sweet as sugar old gentleman who had sung in church choirs his entire life and thought the world of my coming to do music with him even if he couldn't remember who I was or whether or not he'd ever seen me before. Twice a week we worked on maintaining his memories and dealing with his anxiety and depression, and I couldn't help walking out of there every time with a huge smile on my face. He was a delight to work with-- and it just felt so good to be doing music therapy again. Even writing up my data and session notes, usually a chore, just felt so right, felt like coming home.
(I was, incidentally, collecting data at my other job. In fact, I might have been one of only three or four employees who actually read the instructions on how to correctly write-up client notes. Sometimes when I was bored late at night I'd read over the notes other employees had left. There were the employees who had less to say about what the clients had done and more to say about what they fed the clients for dinner. Then there were the clients who mostly just complained about how much cleaning the other employees didn't get done. The most amusing were the employees who wrote, in painful detail, about arguments they had with the client's families.)
But having an honest-to-goodness client exacerbated the graveyard shift problem-- not getting enough sleep.
I'd already been having issues. I had to attend regular trainings for my part time job on things like first aid and working with individuals who had disabilities-- and these trainings were scheduled more for daytime employees than graveyard shift employees. Imagine working an eleven hour shift, then doing a six hour training, then going home and trying to sleep five hours before working another eleven hour shift-- and that's not even an exaggeration, I actually had to do that once.
Then there was the problem that most of the things I wanted to do to build my business (making phone calls, going to networking and marketing events, etc) involved being awake in the daytime, at least for a few hours.
Adding a client with an early afternoon appointment into the mix, and I found myself regularly trying to stay awake 24 hours at a time in order to get everything done that I needed to for both of my jobs.
I was turning into a nervous wreck. I was having mood swings, I was gaining a lot of weight, I started showing symptoms of obsessive compulsive disorder (repetitive, invasive thoughts about making my clients sick if I didn't wash my hands every few minutes), my depression was spiraling out of control, I had trouble forming coherent sentences when I talked... it was a mess. I was not managing to keep up with both jobs. I was doing even worse at managing to keep my own head above water.
So I quietly began turning in job applications to other places. And, soon enough, I managed to get a job at a thrift store near my home. I'd be making less than half as much money-- a huge hit to my finances. But the hours were perfect-- four hours in the morning, five days a week, leaving me the rest of the day to work on my business. So, I accepted, and dove (willingly!) back into the world of retail.
Which didn't necessarily mean a clean break from my residential trainer job. I was more or less wracked with guilt to be leaving-- honestly, I still feel guilty. The facility I was working for has a huge turnover rate, which makes it harder for them to get all of their employees properly trained. This facility has some wonderful qualities and does some great work-- but there are also a lot of problems in how certain things are run, and maybe if I'd stayed I could have been part of the solution to those problems. I hated leaving the women I worked with in the lurch-- the residential trainer program was already understaffed, so I'd be forcing everyone else to work more hours with my departure, and not all of the clients I was serving seemed to understand when I told them that I'd be leaving in two weeks to possibly never see them again. I felt like a rat.
It didn't help that, despite my turning in my two weeks' notice, management never bothered to take my name off the schedule, so the night before my first shift at the thrift store I got some panicked phone calls from the girl with the shift before "mine" wondering where I was and why wasn't I coming in to work? This prompted several phone calls with management while they tried to figure out what the heck was going on-- I still don't know who took care of the clients that night. I felt like the worst, most selfish person in the world to be walking away with such a mess behind me.
But-- but I physically could not be a music therapist and do that job at the same time. I was being stretched to the breaking point. I had to make a choice. And however much I hated myself for leaving, what I wanted, what I'd given so much for, what I'd put years of work and training and sweat and sacrifice into, was to be a music therapist. Not the person trying to fix the organizational and methodological issues at this facility. Not a residential trainer. However much those two would be honorable and important tasks. A music therapist, someone with a unique skill set who could help people in a way that no one else could.
And little by little, as I settled into my new job at the thrift store, I started to feel better. Part of it was the less demanding hours. Part of it was having a more active job that kept me moving. Part of it was being able to bike to and from work, getting more exercise in my day and cutting out a long unpleasant commute. Part of it was being able to spend more time around other people, instead of long nights alone while other people slept. A huge part was just being able to sleep at night-- I felt like I could actually think straight again.
And part of it was just being awake in the daytime. Somehow, nothing is ever quite as bad in the world when I can spend time outside under blue skies and sunshine. So I was able to step out of the shadows and into the light, as I kept going on the journey of trying to make my dreams into reality.
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