doing it all at once

I have been incredibly anxious this start of the new year thinking about professional life and as term is approaching, I am trying to make choices that reduce my anxiety and bring a sense of ease back because I want to be able to feel excited to be starting my data collection. But the crux of the anxiety is systemic.

It’s the reason why therapy isn’t always the answer - individual soothing does not reduce institutional problems. I have been really wanting to do more community work with my PhD. I really miss being a therapist and interacting with children & their families. The trauma informed football coaching I do is wonderful and supports that effort, and I want to do more, or rather, I want to do my PhD work differently.

I have always wanted the knowledge in the hands of people who work directly with children and youth - also children and youth themselves - and there’s so many ways in which academia does not allow for that to happen. I had a wonderful call with someone running a play lab in the US and we discussed play therapy research & the ways in which play therapists have historically not done much outreach or activism.

The practical and realistic and honest answer for both why academics/researchers and why play therapists aren’t expanding in these ways are connected to burnout and capacity and truthfully, funding and/or being paid at all. Structural and institutional issues. I think because of the energy of being around so many play folks, of ideas and visions and small shifts in the spaces we all occupy in our individual play work being exciting, sometimes I end up with this change the world mentality. The changing things on a large scale or uprooting in one swoop. And then the anxiety comes because that’s a hot bed for a “not enough” spiral - you’re not doing enough, you’re not enough.

There’s something I believe Luvvie said at one point of her stories during the lockdowns that is to the effect of, everything you want to do might be for your whole life. I might not be able to do the community work I want until after my PhD, and not holding myself to impossible standards is an act of self-love, self-compassion, and valuing my own humanity.