Changing careers, or even considering changing jobs, can come with a plethora of mental health challenges. I get it. It’s scary, amongst other things! In this blog today, I want to share a little bit about my career and mental health journey to (hopefully) contribute to ending any existing stigma in your life around it
Most people assume that, because I’m a therapist, I have a bachelor’s degree in psychology. Plot twist: I don’t! I have a Bachelor of Music from Belmont University, with an emphasis in music business. My primary instrument was voice. I also interned for two music publishing companies while in college as well. I graduated in 2017. My first career, part of which included my time in college, was as a creative/songwriter. I released my music, wrote for other artists, and performed. I was pursuing every avenue I could to make a career out of it. By the end of 2018, however, I decided to quit pursuing being a creative in the music industry. Put simply: I loved it, and I still do, but there was a deeper sense of fulfillment that was missing.
I was 23.5 years old at the end of 2018. After reflecting and talking with trusted friends, I decided to pursue plan b: a job in the music industry on the business side. A few months later, I was hired at a global talent agency known as William Morris Endeavor (WME). Essentially, the primary function of a company like that is to route tours and coordinate public appearances for artists. I spent the bulk of 2019 working there in the country music department. I loved my coworkers, and I found what we did there fascinating. However, I had that same deep sense in my gut that there was something else out there.
I went to therapy for the first time in my life in August of 2019, when I was 24 years old. My primary reason was that I was unhappy with my job and feeling very anxious about my career. My therapist, being the brilliant therapist he is, picked up on things I wasn’t even exactly aware of at that time. Plot twist: it wasn’t just about my job, and a lot of other things came out. The short version is: I had a quarter-life crisis of sorts, and several pillars in my life collapsed and collapsed quickly. I left WME at the end of 2019. I was 24.5 years old and lost regarding what I was going to do next in my career. I was also deeply struggling mentally. At 29, I can look back and say that was the hardest time for me mentally thus far.
I took a serving job in January of 2020, and we know what happened a few months later. The world shut down. I was unemployed for roughly two months. Leading up to and during those two months, I honed in with my therapist on processing career options. I had seen a lot of mental health issues within the music industry that were not being talked about enough. I was also increasingly coming into my authentic LGBTQIA+ identity, and I saw the need for more queer therapists. There was more to it than this, including a deep fascination with psychology/neurology, but the short version is that these things led me to take an “educated leap of faith” into being a therapist. Ironically, my therapist was also an ex-music industry person who became a therapist.
I applied to graduate school. A few weeks later, I was stuck at home with Covid-19. It was July 2020, and I hopped on Zoom to interview some of the faculty of the clinical mental health counseling program at my alma mater, Belmont University. It was the worst interview performance I’ve ever had, and I’m so grateful that the staff there saw things in me that I couldn’t articulate in that interview. I got in, and a few weeks later I logged onto my first graduate-level class on Zoom. That was the beginning of my career in psychotherapy. I’ll stop here for the sake of brevity, but the short version is: I found that fulfillment that was missing. I absolutely love being a trauma therapist. Maybe we’ll continue this career-related blog conversation next time.
This blog may read a little “too personal” for a company website- but I wanted to get more personal here, primarily to contribute to ending the stigma around career exploration. It’s more than okay to try multiple jobs/careers, and it’s never too late to switch things up. Take it from a girl who is 29, on her (technically) third career, and will be 31 years old when she finishes her PhD. Lastly, utilize your therapist to help you sort through career-related issues! We are a great resource for career-related issues, as it is so deeply tied to mental health.