It’s not exactly a secret that for a majority of my adult life, music therapy was my life.

My initial plan was premed, as I felt a calling to heal folks in some form or another, but I had to be born to the only parents in the history of human civilization to convince their child to drop out in favor of music. They knew where my true passion lies, and it was not in slinging pills or performing open heart surgery. But my parents weren’t stupid — they also knew I needed college if I ever wanted to escape the dull working class existence I’d been born into. Higher education was very much still in the cards for me, and so they brought up an alternative, something I could study that involved both music and healing.

Music therapy.

And from then on, everything in my world revolved around this one thing. I immersed myself in the literature and journals. My fingertips seldom left the fretboard of my guitar as I practiced all the pop standards every client loves. (Wanna hear “Stand By Me”?) I became close with my professors and cohorts and did everything I could to learn from them. There were a lot of uncertainties in the world for me, but I knew in my heart of hearts that I would one day become Jess J. Salisbury, MT-BC.

(Yes, Jessa Joyce is not my government name.)

It was more than a major or a career path to me. Music therapy was my entire identity for upwards of twelve years. Even when I wasn’t in school actively pursuing it, I had designs on getting back into the program when whatever thing I was actively going through was over. It was my Plan A, B, and C. And I got so close to the finish line too. I remember the look of pride on my now-deceased father’s face at the graduation ceremony when I’d completed the necessary coursework. I’d never been more proud of myself. And I was fresh on the heels of winning one of the most prestigious awards at the university I was attending, so everyone was watching in anticipation of what I was going to do next.

I had no idea it was about to come to a crashing halt in the godforsaken city of Fort Wayne, Indiana, where dreams go to die.

When it was time for me to select an internship, it came down between a hospice in the northern suburbs of Detroit (where I was living at the time) with a woman I’d worked with before and admired, or a small clinic in Fort Wayne that specialized in, among many other diagnoses, autism. The idea of leaving the safety of my home state (but, you know, staying in the relative familiarity of the Midwest) was very enticing, and I was giddy at the thought of finally getting to work with my preferred population after going years in the program without the opportunity. Besides, hospice sounded dreadfully depressing to be immersed in for six long months. So the decision was clear. My wife and I packed everything we could into my tiny ass Chevy, managed to stuff Krubby into a crate that was large enough to accommodate his heft, and headed down to Indiana for what was sure to be a better life.

Was I in for a rude fucking awakening.

The internship was not my dazzling launch into the music therapy world, but an exercise in how many ways I could fail spectacularly in only four months. It seemed like I couldn’t do a damn thing right no matter how much I dedicated myself to the job. Every day, there was a fresh new ugly critique, a new way I was fucking up. The criticism far outweighed the praise I received from my directors, who were some of the most caustic people I’ve ever had the misfortune of working for. I remember how they eventually got frustrated with my futile attempts to keep up with the increasing workload and implemented a truly awful spreadsheet system where I had to document every single activity I did all day down to the five minute increment. It was hell on earth. I remember bawling my goddamn eyes out in the car to my poor therapist nearly every day. I was starting to even experience chronic stress-related health issues, and get this — I got my first freaking gray hair from this ordeal.

The breaking point finally came one session when I was working with a preteen girl whose absolute favorite song in the world was “What Makes You Beautiful” by One Direction. It made her happier than anything when she got to sing it with me. One particularly rough session, we were about to wrap up with only a few minutes left on the clock. I had time to play one last song with her, and one goal I hadn’t touched on yet — her emotional goal. I was to play an angry song for her and get her to talk about it.

But she was already escalated.

And she asked me, word for word, with the little verbal language skills she had, to play her favorite song.

I couldn’t not do it.

After that client left, my directors sat me down and told me point blank that I was doing more harm than good with my music. And that fucking stung more than anything else I’d ever been told. Getting rejected from American Idol didn’t hurt that bad. Getting told I sucked as a guitarist by my awful old pastor and temporarily barred from their perfect little worship team wasn’t even that brutal (spoiler alert: it was nepotism the whole time). The implication that my music was hurting people broke me in a way that I’d never experienced before.

All I wanted was to heal the world through music. Now, I began to rue the day I first picked up a guitar.

Metaphorical tail between my legs, I put in my two weeks. It was the most painful decision I’ve ever had to make, essentially pulling the plug on a dream that was languishing on life support. We checked out of the mediocre converted garage of an AirBNB we were living out of and checked into a slightly homier one in Niles, Michigan to regroup. We had no direction anymore. Music therapy was to be my lifelong career path and passion. I was going to continue on and earn my masters and eventually a doctorate, and while it wouldn’t make me rich, it would let my wife and I live comfortably with our potential kids. Those dreams faded into oblivion, and I didn’t even know who I was anymore. Who was the future me if not a celebrated academic and practitioner in the music therapy world? Those days in Niles were spent moping along the river, silently mourning the “Dr.” I would never affix to my name.

On a whim, my wife and I decided to take a day trip up to Kalamazoo to see if any apartment complexes would take pity on us. We’d never been evicted, but we had spent nearly half a year living in AirBNBs, which is not a great look to potential landlords. But, to our utter shock, a relatively nice little neighborhood of townhouses took us in, and the rest is history. I left my music therapy dreams far behind me in Fort Wayne, the cursed city I’d once had such high hopes for. Here, in Kalamazoo, I was going to forge my own path forward.

Am I bitter about my years wasted spent in music therapy school? Maybe a little. I hold no ill will toward my sweet professors in the field, who did absolutely everything to bend over backwards to push me through the program. In fact, I feel a little guilty for the way I have dragged their lives’ profession through the mud after leaving the field myself. But the field itself is fundamentally flawed, and the abject cruelty of my internship forced me to remove the rose-tinted glasses I’d kept on the entire time. Like many fields, music therapy is gatekept behind an exorbitant amount of red tape, particularly in the way the schooling is almost prohibitively expensive for the working class student. My wife had to drain her life’s savings to keep us afloat during the internship, and I’m probably going to be making $600 monthly payments on the credit card bill I racked up for the rest of my life. That’s on top of the terrifying hole of student debt I’m in. As I mentioned earlier, I literally won that prestigious scholarship I mentioned earlier, and it barely even mattered. And I’m one of the lucky ones. I happened to marry someone who came from a fairly well-off background, so she was able to foot the bill for a while, under the assumption that I’d become the full-time breadwinner after earning that degree. But what if you’re not that fortunate? Unless you win a full ride somewhere, you are going to be swimming in debt for the rest of your life. And the internship? Have fun finding one that pays more than a pathetic one-time stipend. You better have a rich sugar daddy or a rich actual daddy to help you keep a roof over your head, because you are not going to want to balance work and the internship.

I’m lucky I got this far. I guess I should be thankful I got such a good shot at being a music therapist in the first place, even if it ultimately didn’t pan out. But honestly, that thought makes me feel even more guilty. I can’t shake the feeling that I squandered my one chance to enter the field proper, especially when I consider all the less-fortunate folks who maybe want to pursue music therapy professionally but simply don’t have the resources to. And that part infuriates me. How many potentially brilliant music therapists are trapped in poverty?

I appreciate music therapy as an art and a science, but I can’t get behind the ways the field itself is currently locked behind the paywall that is our elitist and exclusionary higher education system. There has to be a way to regulate the field and proliferate its key components without the use of an institution that essentially preys on vulnerable young people and their wallets. Don’t get me wrong — I think college is unbelievably valuable for the experience and knowledge it yields. But in this economy? It’s far more fiscally responsible to hit up the library and take out the “…For Dummies” book on your subject of interest.

It’s crazy to me that more folks from the music therapy world — a world that prides itself on inclusivity and progressive values — have not called out this socioeconomic disparity or tried to rectify it. The closest I’ve ever come to getting in a bar fight happened a few weeks back at my favorite karaoke spot in town, and it was not over politics. It just so happened that this region’s branch of the nationwide music therapy organization was having its annual convention in Kalamazoo of all places that same weekend. I met a friendly group of attendees accompanied by one not-so-friendly attendee. He was a little drunk, and to be fair, I probably did an awful job of hiding my bitterness when I relayed my sob story to him. He wasn’t having it and got offended at my suggestion that maybe requiring a four-year degree and an essentially unpaid internship is classist as hell. This man even agreed with me on many points, but ultimately, he fell into the camp of “If I had to deal with this broken system, so does everyone else.” And that mentality is not helpful at all. I saw the same mentality from other musicians when I called out the sad state of the music industry. We all know it’s seedy and shady and lined with red tape, but we are slaves to the status quo, and sadly, a lot of folks don’t even realize it and actively support the people pushing them (well, us) down. At the end of the day, I see Music Therapy the Field as a business, and it’s to the detriment of the art and science of the subject. Which is a damn shame, but like I said, nobody in the field currently seems to care.

So that leaves us here.

A lot of days, I am still unsure of what my direction in life is without music therapy at its forefront. But as I keep having to remind myself, the best things in life are still free. I remember how my initial goal as a future music therapist was to eventually cultivate a safe space for people of all ages and abilities to create music they can be proud of. And honestly, I’m doing the damn thing my own way now. In my day job, I work with autistic kids, and my bosses have been formulating a way to have me come in and perform for the students sometime. I also work as a music bingo host, bringing music and good clean fun to local bars and restaurants. I see the entire families set aside one night a week to come hang out with me and forget about the stresses of the world for a few hours. I’ve been producing music for some of my friends, many of whom have never tried their hands at songwriting before, and I’m blown away on the regular by all the untapped talent in this little town. And on Saturdays, I’ve been hosting karaoke, which gives everyday folks the chance to step into the shoes of their rock star idols. People truly come alive when they step up to the mic, and even as just the KJ standing in the background manning the equipment, I get a strange sense of fulfillment. This is the life I always dreamed of, and it was waiting for me the entire time — no stupid degree needed.

I’ll leave you with a story from the karaoke night I hosted last week. A little girl I’d never seen at the establishment before signed up to sing an Ed Sheeran song I hadn’t heard of called “Old Phone.” It was a somber tune all about the ephemeral nature of relationships and special moments, and in a strange, surreal way, I almost felt like my own inner child was singing to me through her somehow. I felt myself begin to tear up, and so I turned away from the girl for most of the performance. I certainly didn’t want to be rude, but I also didn’t want this poor child to know she’d just inadvertently made the karaoke host sob. She finished the song and went back to her seat.

But she noticed.

She came up to me a bit later and said she’d seen that I’d been crying, and she asked if I was okay. I smiled and told her that her song had just moved me to tears, and she should take it as a high compliment that her performance carried that kind of power.

After all, I said to her, that’s what music is all about.