Hi it's Chai,
A couple years into my doing ceramics, I wanted to revisit some of my initial motivations for playing with clay. It's interesting to note that as I've delved deeper into this hobby-turned-lifestyle, my motivations, approach, and goals have shifted as my skills have increased. While that is fine, reminding myself of why I began in the first place can be a great way to find motivation to keep going, as well as see my progress in some of the goals I set for myself setting foot for the first time into a pottery studio.
One of the professional goals I set for myself starting my 4th year in my career as a school psychologist was to have better work life balance. Work life balance is particularly difficult for school psychologists for several reasons:
We are understaffed: As of 2022, California has 1 school psychologist per 998 students, versus the National Association of School Psychologist's (NASP) recommended ratio of 1 school psychologist per 500 students. That's roughly double the recommended ratio, in other words, each school psychologist is trying to do the work of two school psychologists. This infographic provides a snapshot of the shortage of school psychologists in the United States.
Legal timelines: Special Education law (the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), to be exact), stipulates that different steps in the special education process be completed within certain timelines. For example, requests for assessment have to be responded to within 15 days, a comprehensive evaluation needs to be completed within 60 days. Even after we have assessed and identified a child as eligible for special education, we have to re-assess at least once every 3 years to provide up-to-date information on their development and needs. That means we are constantly chasing deadlines, whilst trying to keep the other plates (e.g. counselling, consultation, advocating for systems level change) spinning.
Suffice to say, as a school psychologist, if I let my to-do list at work dictate my time, I would have no time outside of work. It took me a while to realize this...my 3rd year into my career was probably the closest I ever got to burnout. I was full of doubt about my ability to do the work (imposter syndrome is worth its own blog post), which was very different from how I expected to feel with three years under my belt. That was also the year I started ceramics for several reasons.
I wanted a hobby that would get me to leave work at a decent hour.
Whenever I have to analyze student's behaviors and come up with a plan to change it (the special education fancy-schmancy term for this is a Functional Behavior Assessment), I cannot just set a goal of "Punky Brewster will stop hitting others when in conflict with peers". I need a "functionally equivalent replacement behavior" or to provide the student with a safer, more appropriate alternative behavior to help them achieve their goal. What is Punky supposed to do, if they are not supposed to hit? Lick his friends instead? Or take some deep breaths before trying to negotiate? Or ask an adult for assistance? Framing a goal positively lets a student know what to do, rather than what they aren't supposed to do. "Walk quietly please" is a more helpful redirection than "Don't run and stop making so much noise!".
Applying this to my goal of stronger boundaries between my leisure and work time, a goal of "Chai will make it to the pottery studio by 4:30pm" is better than "Chai will not stay in the office later than 4:30pm" . Otherwise, I can leave the office by 4:30pm, and just vegetate on my couch and doom-scroll through Instagram while half-heartedly binge-watching Netflix, which will not really make me feel refreshed for work the next day.
I needed to get comfortable with feeling uncertain or unconfident about things
In school psychology, we often try to cultivate what Dr. Carol Dweck crowned a Growth Mindset among students. We tell them "our brain is like a muscle", and because of neuroplasticity, we can hone our abilities through practice and learning from mistakes. This is opposed to the Fixed Mindset, where we are born with innate abilities that cannot be changed with effort and experience. In a Fixed Mindset, you're either a math whiz or not, you're either athletic/creative/______(insert a desired ability) or not, and there is nothing you can do to change that.
That year on the brink of burnout, I realized that I was talking the talk, but not walking the walk. I wasn't practicing what I was preaching to my students, because I had a Fixed Mindset about my ability to help them as a school psychologist. And, since we are all subject to the self-fulfilling prophecy, I probably was not doing as good of a job as I could have been if I had been able to see my career as a chance to grow my skills continuously, rather than having to be "good enough" to serve students and families by the 3rd year of my job!
Pottery provided a low-stakes situation for me to get comfortable with not knowing and failing. Nobody's emotional wellbeing or educational experience was dependent on how I shaped my clay. With permission to fail and try again without anybody to be responsible of but myself, I was less wary of taking risks and trying new things. The more I tried, the better I got, and the more experience I had with having a pot flop and saving it, or needing to start over from scratch and pulling my walls just a bit taller the next time round. With this repeated experience of "I can fail and I can try again and fail differently, and over time I get better at this", came the sense of self-competence. That is how clay has healed me and made me stronger.
I wanted to build a more multi-faceted self-identity
Work has a strange place in the culture of United States. When you meet somebody new, within the first minute, the question "What do you do?" pops up and almost always means "what do you do for work"/"how do you pay your bills", and not "what do you like to do". This weighing of one's job on the how we see ourselves, and how others see us, is not as common in other cultures.
However, I am now of the belief that it is generally not a good idea to put all your eggs in a basket. Be it in investing in stocks, or investing in oneself, diversifying creates stability. Even in graduate school, I noticed this difference between those who were entering school as mothers, wives, part-time students, students with a previous career, and myself. You would think that, with more hats to wear and responsibilities to fulfill, these people would be more overwhelmed and unhappy from being pulled in all directions and spread thin.
On the other hand, I had only one goal to achieve and focus on - I had moved halfway across the world into the cold cold midwest just for graduate training to become a school psychologist, I had no family dependent on me, I did not have any other jobs outside of my graduate assistantships, I could devote all my time and energy to this one goal.
Counterintuitively, I observed their overall mental health, mood and motivation seemed to be more stable and positive than mine. Now, I will never fully understand what their experience of that time was like, but I can say that I was the only person who had to take leave of absence to do some work on my mental and physical health (that was when I discovered I had a progressive hearing loss!) in all the students in my cohort.
So, those are the three main reasons why I first set foot in a ceramics studio. And, for the most part, I feel like I do see myself as an aspiring ceramicists, among other roles, and I am more inclined to take novelty, uncertainty and mistakes in stride in the studio and at my job now. On top of that, I have discovered some unexpected benefits of playing with clay after I started! I might write more about those in a part 2 to this blog post.
Until next time, keep Chai-ing!
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