Finding work–life–school–creativity balance was no easy feat. I must be honest and share that it took time. The first five years of my therapy practice, everything went into to that. All of my passion, creativity, and time. Because I had the experience of opening my practice in the US, I thought I was prepared, but I wasn’t. Being a therapist and having a therapy practice in Japan is a whole different ballgame (but that’s a discussion for a different post). It did take me five years to get to a place where I did not need to focus the majority of energy on the practice. The website took be about 2 years to get it to a place where I liked it, and I did it all myself. I also have a blog on the website, two Facebook pages, and weekly happiness challenges. That’s a lot to manage before we even get to actual client work. I work with clients in-session 5 days a week, but email 6 days a week. I try to take Sundays day to focus on schoolwork. It wasn’t until I felt stuck in my practice that I decided to earn my PhD. Because Chad has his PhD, I had realistic expectations of what the process would be like for me.

What I was not prepared for was having to limit how accessible I was outside of in-person or Skype hours to clients. This meant no more e-therapy. I have had to completely restructure my practice to make time for schoolwork. I also had to restructure how available I was to my family. I had to make myself and my schoolwork priority one. Although my clients struggled with the new expectations and boundaries, lucky for me, my family did not. I think it was harder for me not to do as much. I had to take some classes before entering into the dissertation phase of my PhD, and that took about 3 years because I could only take one class a term with my client load and I didn’t want to reduce my working hours. I spent the first two years of the program just focusing on school and work to the extent that I stopped writing my blog and put all of my creativity into school. By the start of year three, I was able to focus on what I wanted to do to express my creativity. I knew I wanted to do whatever it was with Chad. We toyed with writing a book together and that just didn’t feel right. Then we toyed with writing a blog together and that didn’t feel right. Finally, we hit on doing a podcast. It took us about a year to develop it and get it out into the world, but it is a lot of fun and has given birth to our social media presence and our own individual blogs. I must admit I am feeling very fulfilled professionally, creatively, intellectually, and personally. It took a lot of planning, experimenting, and patience. It also took a lot of honesty about my own capacity. It was hard work and a long process, but very worth it.