Author: Erin

Sometimes I have the opportunity to read the blog, “The Happiness Project” (www.happiness-project.com), written by Gretchen Rubin. (There is a book by the same name, a predecessor to the blog, that was given to me by my sister. I find the subject to be well worth my time and energy.) A few days ago, one of the ideas about which the author wrote was that people with intensely positive or intensely negative personalities annoy one another, and that the people with these personalities can’t convert the others into thinking and feeling differently. I have never been one to attempt to convince or convert people, save some times when it’s been very trivial. One of my goals is to validate people’s feelings about their experiences and situations, no matter what they are. And though I agree that conversion is never really a possibility, I do believe that my thoughts are products of choice; I “think” in a way that is flavored by emotions that I’ve attributed to the thought. I too often assign emotion to experiences or occurrences or inflection of voice, etc. This emotion is generally Debbie Downer in nature. I feel like every day something or someone surprises me, and today I surprised myself. Even though I was feeling pretty stressed and vaguely unhappy when I went to work, I changed myself so that I could lead a group session effectively. And I did this by deciding, by intentionally speaking differently and breathing differently and making myself smile. All of these actions have physiological effects that elevate one’s mood. The choices to do things like smile trick the body into thinking it’s happy, as usually the only time one smiles is when, in fact, one is happy.
I did that. I tricked myself and it worked. The group was engaged, I felt connected to my clients, and I was enjoying myself (I usually do, but today I had to use extra effort).
Thanks for reading.

To the best of my knowledge and recollection, worrying has never done me any good. Anticipating the nature of a future experience might typically be good practice for most people, but not for someone such as myself who quite often expects difficulties ahead, or at the very least, judgment by others. More often than not, fortunately, I am able to reach said situation and feel a certain amount of pleasant surprise when realizing my predictions were wrong. However, I still have trouble remaining in the present and not foretelling my future. I believe I am getting better and becoming less anxious, and therefore unhappy, but the process is hard. 

Today I saw a woman who is actively dying. When I entered her hospital room, she was alone, in bed, but seemingly awake. We exchanged a couple of words before she began breathing in a manner that is distinctive of the end of life. I began playing for her, attempting to match the rate of her breath, and hoping to play something soothing at that tempo. Her son came into the room soon thereafter, and he and I had a wonderful conversation about his mother. He told me that his mother had worked in a grocery store for a number of years, and that she accumulated a large group of shoppers who went to that store specifically to see her. She worked as a grocery-bagger, and her son said that the line of shoppers waiting to have their groceries bagged was consistently significantly longer than any other person’s. The grocery store where she worked rewarded gifts of pins to those workers who received excellent customer service acknowledgments, and that drawers full of these pins were found when the family was moving my patient to another home. This other home was her daughter’s, where she lived when she fell ill and had to be hospitalized for a short period of time. At the new home, the patient was also living with her 12-year-old granddaughter. According to the son, this past summer was very special for both his mother and his niece. They were able to spend months living in the same home. While working at the grocery store, my patient became accustomed to co-workers who were in their teens. Knowing popular culture and icons likely gave this woman a unique appeal to her granddaughter– not only was the granddaughter given the opportunity to spend a great deal of time sharing her living space with her grandmother, but her grandmother was actually in-the-know. My patient’s son said that his mother had been entirely lucid until Sunday, when the condition she has transitioned into something much worse. Now, she is unresponsive.

Today I truly felt that I am at the half-way point in my internship. I am assisting with orienting and training our new intern, and am taking on a larger caseload of patients. With this transition, I find looking ahead three months to be easy. This is not to say, by any means, that I am entirely competent at what I’m doing now; but it is to say that I know three months, especially during the holidays, will go very fast. Soon I will be applying to positions within my field– even before the completion of the internship, hopefully.
In three months, with the end of my internship and the potential start of my professional career in music therapy, I hope to have cleansed my life of its debris so that I can face what’s next, whatever that may be, with a degree of confidence, competence, experience, and training in transition.
And I am nearly there.
Thanks for reading.

When I was contemplating writing a blog, my thoughts about it were that the blog would be about everything other than my internship experience. Originally, I thought my writing here would be separate from that “professional” part of my life. However, one of the many lessons I’m learning from this internship and the music therapy work I do is that solid separation such as I thought I wanted is both impossible (for me, anyway), and undesired.
Separation is not synonymous with compartmentalization. The latter is a skill that some people are much better at grasping than others. I feel that I have always been good at separating, and much of the time, to a fault. I have always considered separation as being compartmentalization, and that’s not the case.
In my mind, I have different rooms for people and the places with which they are associated. Events and items also occupy rooms, but usually they are in partnership with either people or places. I have never been comfortable socializing with someone I know from a workplace, for instance. These rooms don’t have windows, so to speak. They are separate entities.
A couple of years ago, I went on a weekend trip with one of my best friends. She and I were in a band together, and we had a gig in Boise to play. During the trip, we spent some time at the library, mostly so that we could use the internet. But we saw that there was a book sale on the ground floor, and we looked through it. The books were of a variety, and I think we both both two or three. One that she bought was a book of short “inspirational” or motivational stories or essays. We read aloud from the books on the drive back, and from that particular book, there was a memorable selection. Of course I don’t remember the title of the book, who wrote it, who wrote the selection, or what it is called, but I do remember what it was. The image portrayed was that of a four-roomed house. The author assigned Cognition, Emotion, Physicality, and Spirituality to each of the four rooms. The instruction was that the reader enter each of these rooms once a day. This made sense to me, and attributed a very clear visual to the thought. Clearly, it’s stayed with me since.
My house has more than four rooms, and it has a basement. I take a mental picture of my house every so often and assess the condition of the rooms. The Spirituality Room is something of an addition, and it’s under construction, so even though I visit it every few days, I still don’t quite know how it’s going to look later. The Physical Room usually is a-shambles, though sometimes I’ll give it a surface clean. The basement, though, has been on fire for a while. The fire is slow-burning and mostly quiet, but every day it burns a little hotter. Smoke has been damaging the rest of the house, and lately the flames are no longer contained. The rest of my house is affected.
Separation and compartmentalization are two different animals. Compartmentalizing is a gift– an ability to acknowledge the existence of strengths and limitations of daily living, but to keep those items and images and ideas contained somewhere should they not directly apply to the situation before me at that moment.
I am finding that I am no longer able to separate. And this is a good thing, because this means I am learning the truth in containment. To contain, for me, is to hold with me all of everything in my life, but to recognize that only tiny trinkets in that mammoth house are really useful in the moment.
Appraise the value of my house, and see that each room influences the others, but don’t allow for one to burn the whole.
Thanks for reading.

I have never thought of myself as an adequate or even functional piano or keyboard player. Though I took some lessons when I was in middle school, and some in college that were required for any music major, I have remained ever-intimidated by the instrument and its complexity. I feel this way about most instruments (which possibly will be the subject of another post– specifically the learning process in relationship to the Suzuki Method), but the piano has always been something that frightens me.
Today, though, I had the privilege to play it on one of the floors of the hospital where I work. Because lunch time was very near, I chose to play in the halls of the floor as opposed to having 1:1 sessions with patients who may be preoccupied with eating. I improvised on the keyboard, starting in the key of C. I don’t think I give myself enough credit, musically, sometimes. I improvised for a while, and had two people come up to me to express that they liked what I was playing. (I promise I wasn’t playing loudly or being intrusive.) This is a new experience for me, given that I actively avoid the instrument, so have little opportunity to receive any feedback from anyone. What was happening with my playing was that I was relaxing into music, as opposed to obsessing about technique or theory. And by doing this, I was sharing more of myself with the people who were listening. From there I moved into playing in different keys and different styles– all things I can do easily on violin and with my voice, but definitely not things I thought I’d feel comfortable doing on keyboard. (Not that I’m magically functional now.) My surprise was in that I was able to find the music in the doing, the bigger picture, the point of the activity. Typically I see in front of me all the reasons I cannot play or do something, or I think that I shouldn’t even attempt to do it unless I am pretty certain I can be great at it. Sounds ludicrous, I know. But I am being honest.
Today I was able to pry open, slightly, a well-shut door, and I did it of my own volition. Maybe, if I practice doing this, I might actually practice playing the instrument so that I don’t have to feel terrified of it. We’ll see.
Thanks for reading.

I wonder if I have ever defined my sense of purpose. I don’t know that I have. My boyfriend took me to a fundraising dinner for the Center for Grief, Loss, and Transition tonight, and we spoke about the possibility for music therapy to be utilized in this organization. This is an exciting prospect, but one that I will let incubate for a few more weeks.
Another piece of our conversation centered around purpose, and our own senses of it. I am going to take this opportunity to define mine, as it stands today: My purpose is to find ways to serve and to help other people, using my unique musical talents and abilities as well as my capabilities to identify and acknowledge characteristics of others that need be lauded as well as developed. I am fascinated by people and the systems in which they survive.
There. There’s a change for me: I defined my purpose for the first time in a long time, if not ever.
Thanks for reading.

Tonight, I had the privilege to attend a concert the Minnesota Orchestra presented. I cannot recall the last concert of any orchestra I have seen. When I was younger, from middle school into high school, I played violin in the city orchestra. I remember feeling relatively indifferent toward the music I played for the concerts at that time in my life. I am sure I saw several concerts when I was in college, but since then, I do not remember having been.
I was so very excited to see this ensemble perform tonight. They were highlighting their upcoming season, and played a piece or two from different concerts on their schedule. So much amazed me about the performance, and some of that was how I was affected by it.
When I moved here, my primary focus was on my internship. The people I know here, I know because of the internship or because of their roles in supporting the internship (I can elaborate if you’d like). However, I have not sought out live performance for years, to be honest. I am beginning to identify myself as a musician (which still makes me uncomfortable), but I have been thinking in terms of research and academia for a long time. For the past three years, my thoughts on music related to how it helps other people, quite simply. My interests were concerning the research surrounding effects of music therapy in a number of populations. Even my reasoning for participating in a band, as I have since I moved here, had much to do with the potential development as a violinist in a non-classical context, which has everything to do with honing those abilities for music therapy.
Tonight’s performance enlightened me. The orchestra and its soloists were phenomenal, and to see them use their talents in that way was especially wonderful for me tonight. I could hardly stop smiling. The energy and genius of those people was outstanding. I feel as though I am a better person for having gotten to participate in that experience. I am inspired, now, to believe in the music I have within me. I am encouraged to embrace the talent I possess, as well as to develop it further. But not because doing so will enable me to be a more effective music therapist (when I become a professional), but because I will be a happier, more fulfilled person.
Thanks for reading.

Today I have had a fantastic birthday. I was privileged to spend it with people I love, doing the job I love doing. I have spent a fair amount of time today with my boyfriend, my co-interns, my internship director, and the patients who so wonderfully welcome me into their lives. Not only this, but I received numerous phone calls and cards from friends and family members. I am so fortunate.
One of the gifts I was given was six pairs of tickets to the Minnesota Orchestra. This particular gift is not only thoughtful, given that I am a musician (oh, how hard it is to identify myself as this– we’ll get to that later), but entirely timely and relevant. What an important present.
I started playing violin when I was two years old, and played for hours each week from that time in my life to my early 20s. In college, I stopped playing. I was burnt out. I didn’t understand why I was playing, or for whom. I grew up playing a musical instrument, but wasn’t making music with it. I wasn’t able to see the violin for what it could be– a tool through which I could express. In music therapy, we consider our musical instruments as tools, and music itself as a tool, to enable us to reach our clients and patients by using it in whatever fashion necessary. When I grew up playing violin, I was not able or given space to infuse the instrument with anything other than the sense of obligation I had toward it. I think of my violin now as a character in my life, a family member. I think of it now as someone, and I do mean “someone,” with whom I grew up; someone who saw me through a number of life changes, as I am experiencing now. My violin is important to me for so many reasons, but only very recently have I identified it as being another range of my voice. Only recently have I given myself permission to melt together my violin-playing-self with my identity as I regularly see it, and only recently have I enjoyed welcoming that part of my life as one with other(s). Having been given opportunity to see the orchestra on a regular basis seems ever-important to me in my growing this part of myself. I doubt a more serendipitous gift could ever be given.
Thanks for reading.

Today marks the final day of my twenty-eighth year; tomorrow, I will accept the opportunity and challenge that my twenty-ninth year brings.
I was telling stories about my childhood tonight. I told a story about how I never played with dolls, but much preferred Mirco Machines or some other car toy. I had a friend (and still do; we saw each other very recently, though she lives in another state) who seemed to enjoy dolls and all things having to do with them. I remember countless times she came over to play, she got so upset that we weren’t going to play with dolls. She’d say, “I am the guest. I should be allowed to choose what we play,” to which I would always respond, “Maybe, but this is my house, and we’ll play what I want.” (And we did.) After telling this story to my boyfriend, he said something to the effect of, “You clearly had no trouble saying what you wanted.” I considered this briefly before moving on to share other stories of my peculiarities, but his comment brought to mind a question: Am I different now than I was as a child? Of course the answer is that yes, I am a changed being– I am a certain number of years older, with a certain number of experiences that have weathered me. But am I a different person? At my core, have I changed? Have circumstances eaten me alive, leaving me to be disconnected pieces that were chewed and mashed and ground out to be single pieces of something that was once a whole? When I was a child, and even on through middle and high school, I was certain of things. The answers to questions were black and white; there was no ambiguity. I understand that maturity is the process through which I grew (and continue to grow) that declares, in a sense, the existence of ambiguity and importance of circumstance surrounding outcomes. But at least I had that certainty and that assuredness that allowed me peace to decide.
Today I feel very different from that person I remember being. I have changed. Now, were I to have a guest who wanted to play with dolls (at this point, I would hope that she or he would be the child of a friend), I would definitely play with him/her. There is something to be said, however, about that knowing what I wanted. I got what I wanted, at the expense of my friend’s comfort and enjoyment (sorry, friend), and I remember really liking that we played with the toys I liked. I work in an extremely taxing environment where I not only serve my patients and clients in music therapy, but I also literally serve them food, beverage, and anything else they may need or want. I feel the need to be careful not to transfer my desire to help at all costs into my personal livelihood. I am recognizing the importance of identifying what I want, be it tangible or experiential, and not feeling guilty for finding ways to have it. I am excited to learn some lessons from my child self and to find and hopefully maintain balance once I do.
Happy birthday, Micro Machine-lover and doll-denier.
Thanks for reading.