Inclusive Music Therapy.

As always, obligatory "sorry it's been so long since the last post" at the top. I just really don't use this blog much any more 😅 but I had something that I wanted to ramble for a bit on that's going to go longer than a social media post can take, so here we are!

For those who aren't aware, to provide some backstory before we get into the meat of it - for the past two years (that is, 2024/25) I've been studying music therapy. It's something that I decided to study for a few reasons - partly because I'd been looking for work for quite some time already without success, and so I looked into what options there were for training up in various areas, and ended up settling on music therapy. I already have the music skills and experience, plus a couple of units of psychology; and listening, caring and empathy are all pretty second nature to me. It seemed like there was certainly demand for this sort of thing, if the trend of psychiatrists, psychologists and the like having massive waiting lists was anything to go by.

But now it's done, and five months post-study and......no job. During the course, there were multiple suggestions that this was indeed a growing field, with people having long waitlists of clients. Unfortunately, it seems like many RMTs (registered music therapists) are working solo, either setting up their own thing or working by themselves in a multi-disciplinary team. Centres with multiple RMTs do exist, but they're few and far between - and not many hiring opportunities have popped up (unless I wanted to have a commute down to Wollongong, or a move up to Newcastle or interstate; there's also been some jobs that are just kids, but I'm not really wanting to do that).

As part of the course, we were encouraged to think about the sort of practice that we'd like to do. I had a pretty solid idea from the start, and it only solidified further over the course of learning and developing more. You see, there's lots of neurodivergent RMTs out there, and plenty that are working with autistic and ADHD clients. A large percentage of those are working more with kids than adults, so there is still some room and demand there for a more adult-focussed neurodivergent RMT I think - but that's not as much what I was interested in. Because you see, there's almost no trans RMTs in Australia. I can name a couple off the top of my head? But to the best of my knowledge there aren't any operating in NSW or the Greater Sydney area that are focussed on trans and queer clients. And so I decided that's what I wanted to do - as a queer and trans RMT, work with queer and trans clients. Not, like, exclusively? Like I could still see people that didn't fall into those buckets. But I wanted that to be my focus, my main target audience as such.

Because I really wanted songwriting to be a key part of the work that I do, and I wanted to be able to have conversation and discussion with my clients, work through issues, that sort of thing - I wasn't as interested in working with kids. I really wanted to be working with teens and young adults for the most part, from a more mental/emotional health standpoint. Like, still trying to work from a holistic standpoint and thinking about how other aspects of health are affected, because that's something that's really important. Towards the end of the course, I also did a project looking at using music therapy for religious trauma, and I would be interested in incorporating that as well.

The dream would be that this would eventually be a centre itself, employing multiple RMTs, each with their own area of inclusivity that they're passionate about - perhaps particular forms of disability, or working with migrants or First Nations people - this is what I would love to see happen. And I came up with a simple name for it: Inclusive Music Therapy.

But I didn't want to start here. Partly because I wanted to get some more experience; for various reasons the placements that I ended up doing meant that I didn't really work with many teen or young adult clients, and if that's what I wanted to be the core of who I was working with, I wanted more experience there. And partly because that would mean both starting in a new industry, and starting a new business, both at the same time. When I'm someone who has zero business sense. So I was hoping to start off in a centre, get some experience, some mentoring, before starting up my own thing.

While I started looking for that, I was on JobSeeker, and started a Self-Employment Assistance course to satisfy the mutual obligation requirements. It was just a couple of days a week online, but it walked you through setting up your own business. And of course, I was using Inclusive Music Therapy as the idea for it; so it meant that the idea got developed a fair bit more. The course involved doing things like putting a budget together, a website, social media page, a business plan - it was fairly comprehensive. To be fair, I had already been working on a website, so much of that part was already done! But putting together the other bits and pieces helped me to get an idea of how doable it might be. The answer - sort of.

Money is always the tricky bit. The rough budget I drafted up (using a fair bit of guesswork, but it gives me a ballpark) suggested that if I started off doing 16 sessions a month, and most months was able to increase the number of sessions I was doing by two, and had about $1000 there saved as an initial investment into the business, I'd be breaking even about a year or so after I started. I'm going by number of sessions, by the way, rather than number of clients, because clients won't necessarily have the same regularity of sessions. Some might do weekly, others fortnightly, or monthly, or even every three weeks. So I'm measuring off number of sessions per month. The figure that I'm using for cost is based off the current NDIA price measure for music therapy - the maximum that an RMT can charge for a one-hour session for an NDIS participant is $156.16, so I did some rounding to make things simpler and put it at $155.

And now the course is finished - and I still don't have work. I've been applying to things (both music therapy and otherwise), but nothing that's gotten me an interview. It's hard to know if being autistic, ADHD, queer, non-binary and trans are part of that (I always include that in my cover letter), because most of the time you hear nothing back at all, and never really any specific feedback. But it's starting to feel that way at points. That I'm getting lumped into the too-hard basket. But I want to be working somewhere where they see these things as a plus, not a liability. But yeah. Not having work kinda sucks sometimes.

So now, I'm more seriously considering the possibility of starting up my own music therapy business. I've gotten more of the tools to be able to do it from a business perspective, so it feels somewhat less daunting in that sense. And encouragement from others has led me to be less worried about not having as much experience as I would like with teens/young adults specifically in this area, since I can apply it across from other areas. But the thing that's going to make it doable is having enough clients to start.

I think that the demand is there. There just aren't a lot of mental health services for queer and trans people available, and many of them are already struggling with the amount of people trying to access them. And there isn't an RMT in the Greater Sydney area working in this space currently; so theoretically at least, there's quite a large number of potential clients. It's just a question of whether I can actually reach them. I don't really have a lot of money that I can put into advertising and marketing before I even get things started; but perhaps I have enough to start getting the word out, and seeing if I garner enough interest.

One thing I can do is make the website that I've been working on public. It still definitely needs a bit of fine-tuning, but perhaps it will help me to get some potential clients and be able to see if this is something that could actually work. Also just like, feel free to comment if you know people (or are people!) who would be interested, or share this with those who might be.

Before I finish up, if you hadn't figured out, that's the logo at the top! Yes, I designed a logo for it. It's pretty simple - it's a piano that's using the colours from the progress pride flag for the different keys. It just works out with how the different keys and letters and colours line up, and I'm quite happy with it, for a logo done by someone who is not a graphic designer 😅 I'm sure someone else could make it a bit neater or cleaner or crisper, but it's fit for purpose at this point.

But yes! Inclusive Music Therapy. If there's enough interest - maybe I could actually make this happen. It will be a lot of work to get off the ground, and there's probably still a bunch of business stuff that I'll need to wrap my head around; but I'd love to have the opportunity to try.

Some Of My Story.

It's been...a while. I really haven't been good at writing anything on here for some time now. But over the past little bit I've realised that I've got a fair few new people in my life now who don't really know my story. So I thought I might have a go at summing it up here. 

Obviously, this won't cover everything. I'm not really talking about most of my life really before COVID except as background. Also a lot of this I did as a Fringe show, with my own songs! So if you'd prefer that format (though it will be a bit different, it's a few years old now) here's the link.

I grew up in a Christian family. Both parents Christian and from Christian families as well. Went to church every week, went to a Christian high school, had some jobs in prominent Australian Christian organisations. Even went to Bible college for a year (it was this sort of young adults leadership/spiritual growth/Bible college course with just a small group), and ended up working leading the music at a church (as it happened, just down the road from the high school I'd been at). I was down the rabbit hole pretty deep, in many respects. 

At the same time, though, I was still quite left-leaning. I'd grown up in a church that had women leading up the front, I was pro-choice, rather anti-capitalist, thought that guns and war were terrible ideas, and tended to follow science and history a fair bit. But also - I still thought that I was straight, monogamous, and a cisgender man. Though I didn't know the word cisgender at the time 😂 That was all about to change, though. 

Perhaps strangely, the way that it changed was getting married. Yes, for those of you that didn't know, once upon a time I was married. You see, I knew I wanted romantic relationship, I was very much a romantic. And the system and context that I grew up in said that the only okay way to do that was with heterosexual monogamous marriage; so that's what I pursued. With a fair few bumps and wrong turns along the way (thanks autism), but we eventually got there in the end. I ended up getting married early in the year of 2020. 

Something else happened that year! 😅 We managed to get our honeymoon in before lockdown happened, but then all of a sudden we had a lot of time to ourselves. I don't know about you, but for me, that led to a lot of introspection. And I'm already a fairly introspective person by nature.

You see, at some point a while before this, I'd had this thought of, "if I'd grown up in a different family that wasn't Christian, I'd probably be a trans woman at this point." And this was quite a common thought I had, that I didn't really think much about - I kinda just accepted it as a fact, thought there's nothing much I can do with that, and put it on the shelf for another time. (To provide a little context, part of the reason that was a thought I was having was because I really didn't associate with a lot of things considered traditionally masculine, and often tried to actively move away from those.) But then, come lockdown, and all that introspective time - my brain thought it was a great time to bring that thought off the shelf again and have a closer look at it. And that was the start of rather a lot happening. 

Because you see, that was kinda like opening the lid to Pandora's box. As soon as I started looking at my sexuality and gender more closely, all my preconceived notions basically fell apart. And after a bit of Googling, I relatively quickly figured out that I was non-binary, pansexual, and polyamorous. ....as you can imagine, that was a lot for me to take in all at once. It also wasn't as surprising as perhaps it should have been. (Of course there were signs. I was just blinkered.)

But this then posed rather a few problems. The first one was just theological - everything I'd believed up to this point said that this wasn't really okay. And so I did some more digging, and some more research. After a bit of time, I'd basically resolved those qualms - though also more of my preconceived notions around religion and spirituality were being rocked, and deconstruction was kinda happening all at once now. 

The next problems were, I was still married. And working at a church. So this is where I had a choice. I could try to ignore what I'd learned, and just keep living life how I was. I was in a good relationship, I had a job I enjoyed - and even though the church I was at had a lot of people with different views to me, there were still a lot of people there that I cared about and enjoyed spending time with. And I tried to make that work for a little while. I told my wife at the time about the things that I'd learned about myself, talked through it all. She accepted me for who I was, but also affirmed that we'd committed to a monogamous relationship, and that's not something she was comfortable with sacrificing (which was understandable).

So I tried to accept that, for a time, and live mostly how I had been. I'd started connecting with some queer communities online and talking with people there, but I wasn't talking about it with other people I knew personally. After a couple of months like this - I knew I couldn't keep going this way. It felt like living a lie. It felt like I wasn't able to be truly myself. But I also knew that if I did take that step, it would mean losing a lot - my marriage, my job at the church (thankfully I did have another job, but still), many friends, and possibly family as well. Was that worth it?

To me, it was. And so started a rollercoaster of my life for the next few months.

First, was another conversation with my wife at the time. Understandably, she was rather upset, and didn't want to separate. But also wasn't willing to compromise on her own beliefs (and I wasn't asking her to). So I gave her some time. It ended up being a few more months before we separated. Before it happened, I started slowly talking to each of my immediate family about what was happening, and then to my pastor at the time. The conversations were difficult, though not all as hard as they might have been. And then I moved out, and away.

It wasn't too long after that when I came out online, publicly. While there were certainly plenty that were shocked or concerned, there were also many that were encouraging, or that were really happy that I'd come out. I started to have people come out of the weeds that I hadn't talked to in ages, and it turned out they were queer as well! I just hadn't known. And in the years since it's been wild how many friends I've seen come out or transition, often people that I'd been very close to before. What do they say about birds of a feather? 

I started living more authentically as myself, but a lot of things took me some time to figure out. I found an affirming church fairly quickly, and then another one not too long after that which felt more at home to me. I started wearing more skirts and dresses, and after a time growing out my hair. I started trying they/them pronouns, and more recently both they/them and she/her. I tried using a gender-neutral version of my old name for a while, before finding my first name, and then the full name I use now. I found a lot more queer friends and communities to connect with, both online and in person. I felt more....me.

That doesn't mean there hasn't been issues. The road with my family has been bumpy, but they're learning, and trying to be better. I ended up finishing up with that church I was at, partly because of my own deconstruction journey, but partly because of how the church changed as well. I've dealt with more depression and burnout over the past few years than I think I have in the rest of my life. And being a transfemme person that still has a flat chest and stubble a lot of the time, I get misgendered a lot. But has it been worth it? Hell yes. And I will take living authentically every time, even when the cost is high. 

This isn't the end of my story, and neither is it all of my story. But hopefully, having this part of it here like this can be helpful for people to understand me better. And also just as a reminder to myself now and then, of how far I've come. It's been quite the journey. And if you've been a part of helping me get here - thank you. You're part of the reason that I stick around.

On Just Surviving.

Apologies for the long hiatus here, folks. This blog just keeps slipping lower down on my list of priorities, and that list just keeps getting added to...I also feel like I just don't write as much as I used to. I often feel like I don't have anything to write about. I tried to actually write a post about that, a month or so back, but didn't get very far.

But what I want to wrte about today is something that's been true for a bit longer. For a while now - I'm really not sure how long, to be honest - I've been more surviving than anything else. Just getting through each day. Not really feeling like I'm thriving, or living fully, or getting that much joy out of life most of the time. I'll snatch little moments of that - and I'll treasure them when they arrive - but they do seem to be more moments than anything else.

And I'm not actually sure why that is, honestly. Because there's so many different things that it could be.

Maybe it's because I'm burnt out from about two years of working in my last job when I wanted to leave, because most of the joy in the job was gone for me, and it was just draining me like nothing else - but I couldn't find any other work. (And still haven't.) So I had to stay.

Maybe it's because I'm living in a world where we need to work to survive, despite the abundant resources and technology that we have. Where having a home is a privilege, not a right. Where being able to eat a balanced diet costs an arm and a leg. Where you need a car to work most jobs, but can't buy one unless you've got a job. And if you have a disability that needs specialist attention or equipment - you'd better hope that disability services will give you the money that you need for things, because everything costs a mint. Where, even though I'm studying a course that I love, to move towards a job that I think I'm going to love too - I'd really much prefer to be working on my own projects. I have so many. Probably too many. And chances are, none of them would earn me a cent - in fact, most of them would probably cost me a fair few. And I also just need to rest, and recover. But capitalism doesn't like that.

Maybe it's because I'm living in a post-lockdown world. Not a post-pandemic world, mind - Covid is still everywhere, and probably will be for a long time to come. But living in lockdown for weeks on end, months on end; it changes you. And I think it changed us, in many ways, as a world. And I don't know if we've really ever recovered. I don't know if we can.

Maybe it's because constantly, year after year, there are things happening on an international level that chill me to the bone. The war in Ukraine. The Trump presidency. The war and genocide in Gaza. Somehow, Trump presidency 2, the white right boogaloo that apparently enough people wanted. And so many smaller things that we just never really get to hear about, because its not "primetime" enough for our screens.

Maybe it's because depression is a bitch. That fucking sucks. And that medication isn't helping with. (Mental health medication has a great history of having almost no effect on me, positive or negative. It's wonderful. Thankfully that doesn't extend to other sorts of medication.)

Maybe it's because all of these things, in their own ways, take up my time, my energy, my space - and leave me with less to actually do things that would bring me joy. Like spending time with people. Like doing board games with folks. Like doing theatre. Like doing music with people. Like getting out into nature. And...other things that I'm not going to say on a publicly available internet post. And instead means I'm spending more time attempting to rest and recover, or doing things so that I actually have enough money to survive, rather than things I'm actually looking forward to.

Too many of my days, and too much of my time, I'm just....existing. Surviving. Doing what I can to get by. Trying to find the next thing to look forward to, to keep me going a little longer. And I hate that. I really do. It makes life feel....empty. Hollow.

Despite all this, I'm not actively suicidal. Which is something. But I've always been very pain-avoidant; I don't deal with pain very well. Most thing that kill you will hurt. A lot. Particularly if they don't actully kill you. There's exceptions, of course, but they're usually a lot harder to just come by casually.

But also, there's a lot that I still hope to do in my life, that I haven't gotten to do yet. I don't know when those things might happen, or how they might happen, or if they will. But I want them to, one day. Dreams like travelling to different countries; playing my music with an orchestra; seeing a musical I've written performed on stage; and so much more. But these aren't really things you can try and work towards, when you have no job, no money. But there's always that hope that there will be a change; that this too shall pass, and you will see the sun rise again. It's difficult to actually feel that, properly; but I know it, at some level. And that helps.

All this to say - the world's a lot shit right now. And there's not a lot I've felt I can do about that for some time. But I'm keeping on keeping on - in the hope that one day, things will be less shit. Or at least, a bit less shit for me. That would be a start, selfish though it may be.

The End Of An Era.

Okay, perhaps that's an overly-dramatic title 😅 but it does feel a bit like that. 

I'm finishing up my job at the museum. I've been working there for just over four years - I started just as things were opening back up after the lockdowns in 2020, and just as I was starting to figure out a lot of stuff to do with gender and sexuality and the whole shebang. 

I have a lot of memories from working there. Some good, some not so good. But I think that's true of most jobs. But I'm certainly grateful for the people that I met along the way - a bunch of queer folks and neurodivergent folks, and people from very different walks of life to my own; many that I now feel privileged to call friends. I'm also grateful for how the museum took me coming out, changing my name and gender identity, all well in it's stride. 

But, as many folks close to me will know, I've been struggling there for a while. The work has been burning me out mentally quite a bit, and that's been a struggle. But finding other work has also been a struggle! As it is for many. So knowing that I'm finishing up now - there's a lot of different emotions mixed up in there, but certainly high among them is a feeling of relief. Hopefully, wherever I'm at next, or whatever I'm doing next, won't burn me out as much. But that's hard to know before you start. 

People might be wandering what's next, and that's a great question! I don't really know either. I don't have other work that I know I'll be doing after this. Still applying to other jobs, so there are possibilities - but no certainties. 

I'll be okay for a while. Probably need to be a little careful with money for a bit, but I'll be okay. But yeah, I don't know what's next. I guess when I know, I'll tell you! But for now - I'm looking forward to some rest. It's much needed.