What’s up. Recently, my chronic pain, thoracic outlet syndrome, has been much worse than normal. I know why and I’d do it again. I’ll explain. I make my living as a psychologist and I am mentally healthier now at 57 than I have ever been. It took a long time to get over a couple decades of trauma, and then to pull away from people who were near me because of who I was while I recovered.
It’s weird to get to a clearer place only to realize that your job helping people drained you so deeply that you need to cut back on the number of hours. Which cuts back on the income. So over the past year I have started a couple of side gigs to, eventually, pull enough income that I can stand back from doing therapy on a regular basis.
The one that is taken off the fastest is my new podcast, Anarinya. I’ve started by loading my Guided Meditations and mindfulness meditation course lessons. I still have months of meditations to re-edit and upload. However, I am looking at diving back into my college professor days and teaching some psych courses on the podcast. Abnormal psychology is always the most popular psych class in undergrad so I’ll put together class lectures for that, and post those. Likely this fall.
I’m also taking some of my free time now to study music therapy because music always works to help me feel better and it naturally led to, “Why am I not teaching Music Therapy to my clients and podcast listeners?“
The other thing that has unexpectedly brought me joy is feeding the birds on my balconies. It started as a way to keep iguanas from eating my balcony garden and crapping all over the place. They are not clean animals. It has turned into getting up every day, feeding the birds and feeling like a proud mom when they showed up with their babies in the spring to get food. I now record them a few days a week and edit that video, which is where my chronic pain comes in because the editing process requires precise movements on the mouse pad and that aggravates my thoracic outlet syndrome. I edited for a couple of hours yesterday and the pain was so bad that I woke up this morning still hurting from my fingertips all the way up to my jaw on the right side.
So why do I keep doing it? Because I love doing it and it turned into a YouTube channel that’s actually doing well and will be able to bring in income. Not right away, it may take a few years to build up enough to make a significant difference in how I manage my finances, but the potential is definitely there. The.EclecticCafe Instagram account is already monetized and I edit some of the longer videos into short ones Instagram and TikTok. Usually posting every day.
Now, I am still an author, and I still put words to paper, figuratively, every week. I have a new series I’m working on that has been bubbling in the back of my head for probably six or seven years. It took me a really long time to figure out where this character belonged. I have her job, her partner, and the supporting cast pretty much in place. I have built an amazing town where she lives. I don’t know when the series will come out but it is very much in the works and I’m so excited to see what everybody’s reaction is when it pops into the world.
That’s update Summer 2023.
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