Melody's Musings

Over the last few weeks and months, I've  noted the increase in discourse amongst other Acupuncturists about the future of the profession and the supposed impending Acupocalypse that is coming.  This post isn't a replacement for reading everyone else's substack and isn't meant to be an exhaustive overview of what has already been discussed. Many of the other blogs and substacks have focused on the point of view and experience of the people writing those blogs and substacks and even talking on those podcasts. That's more my angle here- I feel that my trajectory into the profession was a bit different than others.

I did come from poverty- the kind where even when both parents would work, you still had foodstamps and were familiar with the WIC restrictions on purchasing specific products and being told to turn all the extra lights off all the time and to wear your coat in the house if you were cold in the winter because we couldn't afford the thermostat to go above 66 degrees F in the upstate NY winters.  That meant, when it came to higher education, that I was very much dependent on financial aid and student loans. When I applied to undergrad in fall of 2005, I was rationing my applications because every $75 application fee represented roughly 16 hours of work at my minimum wage job after school- almost an entire week's worth of pay. I applied to exactly 3 schools and was accepted to all 3 but decided to go to RIT mostly because of my overnight experience there when I had gone to the camp for Project Lead The Way (my school had several different engineering courses one could participate in and even opt for college credits at RIT if you paid for the credits- at $200/class I was priced out of such opportunities but I took the classes to a point because I enjoyed them).

Along with my acceptance letters came my dad's job offer. While I had applied to 3 schools within an hour's drive of home thinking I could come home on breaks, that plan had changed. My family moved to Texas shortly after moving me in to the RIT campus. While most college students would have only had to pack what they needed for a few months at a time into their dorm room- for me it was packing up my whole childhood, unsure if I would even have a space in my family's new accommodations down south.

I worked throughout undergrad, often past the point of exhaustion, often to the detriment of my grades. By the end, my mantra was "C's get degrees" because going to bed at 11pm and waking up at 5am every morning wore even on my 20 year old self. And yet, even working 20-30 hours per week and attending school full time, I could not afford to pay for all of my living expenses and my family couldn't help. I became a sleuth at ordering old editions of the textbook or not ordering the textbooks at all. When the workarounds wouldn't work, sometimes I would just withdraw from the class, unable to do the work required or the reading needed to be able to get a passing grade. In 2009, when my parents wouldn't fill out any more loans or FAFSA applications for me but I could not get financial aid without their information, I found that marriage was a loophole from having to have their income counted. My boyfriend at the time obliged.

I was doing all of this, being told to pull myself up by my bootstraps, being told I was lazy and needed to apply myself, and trying to find ways to get through every hurdle (with undiagnosed ADHD among other things no less). I had become so used to one tragedy following another that I didn't even bother crying when my car blew a head gasket and drove home in the cloud of smoke- with no heat in the 30 degree below zero windchill. I actually have many such stories. After a while, the good times start to feel like a threat because you're so used to everything going wrong that you're not only waiting for the other shoe to drop you're wishing that it would so you can get to solving the next problem. I've gotten really good at spotting bigger problems before they happen now. Some call it a superpower- I call it hypervigilance and PTSD.

Melody- what does any of this have to do with acupuncture and the trajectory of the profession? I'm getting to it- you need background and you need to know where I'm coming from. You need to know that I'm not some trust fund kid or irresponsible person who "just took loans out for the hell of it". The student loans used to keep me up at night. I thought after undergrad that I would be able to find a job that paid the bills and left a little something after that to save, perhaps to buy a house or go on vacation. I worked on the Department of Education contract for federally defaulted student loans from 2012-2015. I forewent having insurance because the company I worked for would pay us the insurance subsidy if we didn't elect for health insurance. At nearly $19/hour, I would make just barely enough to make the minimum payments on everything if I split a very cheap apartment with a roomate. If I took the health insurance offered by the company though they would take both halves of the insurance contribution out of my paycheck, to the tune of over $600/mo (yes, back in 2012). For a little while under the ACA I was able to get my parents' health insurance and then there was a year or two where I just plain did not have coverage. Sitting down and doing my budget with a financial advisor, I could see that the student loans would not be paid off in the 10 years I was lead to believe. Working in federally defaulted student loans allowed me to see many many accounts where the borrower had more than repaid their original debt yet still owed more than they had borrowed after 30 and even 40 years. It also allowed me to see every single loophole that could exist within the system.

During that time frame, I navigated a separation from that marriage that I had entered into partially out of a financial contract. The emotional stress of that, and of realizing that I was in a dead end job hit me like a brick wall. I felt hopeless. I felt isolated. My facebook feed was all people I had gone to RIT with writing real research papers, becoming doctors, going on vacations, owning houses. And there I was in the same apartment I had had since 2010 shuffling roomate after roomate in and then out again- drinking on the weekends just to arrive at Monday wishing for Friday again. I also had done the autistic thing of overperforming at my job and then failing to be consistent in maintaining burnout levels of productivity over the long term, where they unsustainably just expected you to infinitely outperform the month prior month after month. I was aware my days at the company were numbered, as well as that their days on the contract were numbered. I was having trouble sleeping. I was waking up in cold sweats with night terrors. Then I saw that a friend of a friend had graduated acupuncture school and that he was running a Groupon.  Having been previously married to a massage therapist, I knew groupon was a bad deal so I called him up and asked him if I could just get the groupon deal directly through him so he could keep more of the money- of course he agreed. 

My acupuncture experience was nothing short of magical. After the first treatment, I slept like a baby. I cooked the herbs he sold me in my brand new cuisinart pots I bought because the ex made a big deal of taking the revereware. They were bitter but tolerable and best of all they helped. I felt like I had come alive again from being dead inside. The experience had clarified for me a path forward as well. I had been looking at length at different paths, different programs. Alternatives to working in an office. I knew from experience that I did not have the social mask necessary to successfully navigate office work long term- that eventually coworkers realized I wasn't just like them and then I would give them this uncanny valley feeling that no one could sort out why it happened and I would be ostracized until they found an excuse to get rid of me. I had worked that much out but had still not worked out I was ADHD yet at that point. I had started exploring my spirituality and I had gotten really into my health and herbalism again in the divorce- stuff my ex had frowned upon. I had been looking into midwifery, nursing, naturopathy (which is not licensed in NY), I had thought about massage therapy, had looked into reiki and had an experience with that but acupuncture seemed to walk this line that blended the things I liked about the other paths. It had the spiritual and mystical aspects to it but was still backed by medical science and licensing.

Not long after that magical acupuncture experience, I applied to and was accepted to acupuncture school. At that point, I had already resigned myself to the fact that the student loans would never be repaid, to the idea that home ownership might never be within reach, to the fact that I might eventually find myself in federal default and considered all of my options. I decided that if all of those things were already true, then the debt might as well be for something that I can make a fulfilling career out of. I signed the documents knowing the predatory scheme that lay ahead- because what choice did I have? Resign myself to no health insurance, no job, no prospects? The way I saw it, this was one of the only ways into a profession that might even qualify for public service loan forgiveness or some of the other programs. I also saw at the time that student loan forgiveness was and still is an inevitable outcome.

Remember that bit about expecting the next tragedy? Well, that continued throughout acupuncture school but I made it! And then I forgot to budget the funds into my loans for the cost of my exorbitant board exams. $500 just to apply to be able to pay to take the exams, then another $750 each for two more exams as the bare minimum for licensing in New York then another $780 for initial licensing. I graduated in April of 2019 however, I did not raise the funds to take the exams until November of 2019 and at that I didn't even do it alone. Even working as a pharmacy tech nearly full time and not paying rent, several thousand dollars are hard to come up with! So it came to pass that my board exams were scheduled for January of 2020. I took my exams in the middle of a snowstorm after cramming for 2 months straight. I was waiting for my results when... A PANDEMIC began...

I received my test results just as lockdown was beginning, followed by my license, just to be told that we were not essential healthcare. And then that we were in fact essential healthcare. I sat on that license for another 6 months before I could do anything with it. When I did use it, I took a job in a city over an hour drive away taking No Fault and Worker's Comp cases at the time. I was still working full time on the Contact Tracing initiative then doing 2 days per week in the clinic in another city. It was over 3 months before I saw a penny from the acupuncture position because of many of the patients cases being in denial. It was working that type of case load and seeing the reimbursements and the low settlements that made me realize that the insurance aspect of things wasn't for me. I left the position after less than a year and no longer take insurance directly because of the paperwork and the games the insurance companies would play when it came to paying me for my work. I had also during that time met the love of my life, gotten married and gotten pregnant.

During my maternity leave, I did my doula training, my hospice and palliative care acupuncturist certification, etc. I stayed busy. My husband Zach and I were looking at buying a house so I took a break from practicing so that I could figure out where we landed before trying to start a practice. Then in 2022 we bought our house in Newark, NY. I started my practice out of our home and thought as everyone had said that my practice would fill up quickly that it would however that was a rude awakening. Unlike when we lived in Rochester, I didn't really have a network of acquaintances out here. I was largely unknown. I had to learn how to market. I had to start a business on a shoestring budget with next to no funds of my own to speak of and without borrowing any money from my husband. I learned how to make my own website from scratch after spending hours researching what platform to use and what would be the cheapest and most accessible way to go about it. After about 10 months, I got curious and looked around and was lucky that there was another acupuncturist in the area looking to hire an associate. At the time, my son was about 2 years old so I was feeling more confident being able to leave him a couple days per week. It worked out initially that I worked on my husband's days off so we just traded out and didn't have to pay for childcare. That arrangement worked well until he was ultimately laid off and started his own business as well.

The similarities between my own story and the ones I've heard from others are not lost on me. The realization has now hit me that even though I set out to address the bigger issues of the profession, I've merely told my own story so hold onto your pants for part 2...