Hey, I’m Nadja.

I’m a mom.

Before you think that’s a 1950s identity qualifier ain’t nobody got time for, hear me out. Cos for this newsletter, it totally is what I build my pedigree on. (Minus the man and all that oppressive 50’s BS, though I semi-kept the skirts. Definitely dropped the high heels.)

I parent a 14-going-on-40-year-old son called Alexander. Though we do take turns. Sometimes he parents me. Especially when I’ve been alive for more than three decades and I still can’t figure out how the airconditioning works. He’s been unschooling since he was 5 and worldschooled since he was 10. He also happens to be the single most incredible homo sapien I’ve ever met, though my awe might hinge on an ever-so-slight bias.

I’m a teacher.

I have an educational background in psychology and education. After a ten-year gap, during which I was a worn-down entrepreneur, an evil marketing henchchick, a soulless corporate drone, and a naive fintech journalist who had her dreams of a better tomorrow abducted by a dark wizard, I returned to teaching.

I currently teach business and sustainable development to high school students, some of whom have gone on win a global entrepreneurship competition. I get kids. I work with them every day. I know what they’re dealing with, and where they’re at.

I’m also a teacher trainer, working with teachers of all ages, who teach anything from primary to secondary and high school. I get teachers, too. I am them every day. I understand how hard they work, how difficult it is to reach their targets, and what little ROI they get for all their herculean efforts.

I’m a student.

Graduate life doesn’t become me, since squeezing in study time is like getting blood from a stone. However, I remain under the thinly veiled illusion that I’ll be walking away with a Masters in Education at some point in the distant-ish future. I can be found reading educational research for fun and self-flagellation.

I’m a writer.

In a weird twist of pandemic-inspired resolve, I launched Blue Squirrel to write about the wild thought parties these different identities throw in my head whenever I’m careless enough to leave them to their own devices for a time.

I write about:

• what self-directed learning looks like,

• why it matters,

• how to partner with your child and maintain a beautiful friendship (if you’re of the “parents aren’t your friends” persuasion, go away - you’ll grow to hate me in about 3 minutes),

• how to navigate the teenage years without making your kids hate you,

• WTF Baccalaureus Unschoolentus is all about, and

• what not to do if you don’t want to fail miserably at preparing children for a world that doesn’t exist yet.

This is not an exhaustive list. I’m pretty wordy when I’m not too busy being exhausted (or just plain busy, though I’m on a huge mission to stop that shit). So you might catch me writing about stuff like:

• raising feminists (warned you I’m one of those people),

• why I keep quitting dream jobs cos they’re bad for me, and

• field notes from my work or research in education.

I’m a trauma survivor.

I’m leading with this rather than present myself as someone with a degree in psychology because I’ve learned more from my own healing journey than anything formal training ever could’ve taught me.

I started down my own recovery path when I was 12 years old. In retrospect, it was a tad optimistic, since I had another 16 years to go before I would finally manage to break totally free from the trauma environments that bound me.

Consequently, my traumas - bountiful as they have been - have shaped the best and the worst of who I became and am still becoming. As a result, much of my expression of self and the work I have chosen to do in the world have been trauma-informed, even if it wasn’t always at a conscious level.

Currently, I am focusing on integrating the phenomenology of trauma and how it interplays with every aspect of our lives not only at the individual level, but also systemically as it relates to some of the major overarching social structures in our lives, including education, the business world, and our relationship with the environment.

Approaches and modalities I find useful on my own journey that I talk about include:

• How science and mind-body research are meeting in the middle to prove to sceptics and remind believers that to be here and be well, we need an all-inclusive approach to our existence as human beings that include the somatics of the body, the power of the heart, the expansiveness of the spirit, and the ingenuity of the intellect

• The perilous danger of intellectualisation at the expense of embodiment for our bodies are - as Jungian analyst Dr Clarissa Pinkola Estés puts it - our consorts

• How individual, intergenerational, systemic, and collective trauma has ravaged humanity and our shared responsibility to heal ourselves and our world, especially as it relates to our education system, the business world, and our toxic partnership and unsustainable interactions with the natural world

• Utilising creativity, imagination, and storytelling to help walk us home to ourselves, to each other, and to the world around us:

  • Archetypal typology as a means to tap into the collective unconscious and help repair the relationship individuals, communities, and corporate and political entities have with the natural world

  • Mythology as a means to provide the young and those who are young at heart with a doorway into a collective past and a shared belonging in service of supporting and healing the relationships between the adult world so often stooped in an atmosphere of fear and negativity, and our children and inner children

Why subscribe?

To prevent a full-scale nervous breakdown from adding another item to my formidable sumo wrestler of a to-do list, don’t expect a weekly newsletter, not even roughly speaking. Screw what the marketing gurus say - my philosophy is keeping silent till I feel I have something to say. So it’ll come when it does. I’m as much in the dark about how often that’ll be as you are. When it does show up, I figure that sometimes it’ll be a big pot of winter soup full of chunky goodness. At other times, I’ll serve up a cement salad harvested from a demolished building nearby.

Since this is an email newsletter and current calculations estimate I’ll reach my own Inbox Zero when I’m 776, I solemnly swear to not send anything your way unless I feel it’ll add to your head ballet in some way. (Side note: If your neurons really are synchronised to Swan Lake, any chance you know the formula to weaning brain cells off a deafening punk-metal pattern? Asking for a friend.)

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