This section is about adventures you can invite me on! Even in everyday life I need a variety of formats and topics to apply myself to, a frequent “change of scenery”. All of this keeps me constantly learning and looking for new things, making discoveries in my professional life and beyond, and it is why I take on “risky” projects.

For example, as a student I agreed to organize a student press competition at short notice. Later I translated a book on mediation from English into Russian. For a while I wrote for various publications (journalism still beckons me; I watch it from afar and “wave” to it). This gave me experience interviewing scientists and simply interesting people, writing texts together with experienced editors and journalists, and making useful, instructive mistakes.

Then came a dissertation in psychology (yes, I defended it, and it took barely ten years from the day I started). Then came the birth of my son, from whom I have learned a great deal (from making big and small decisions with scarce resources to behavioral play therapy and various self-management methods in everyday life).

There was a support group for women facing reproductive difficulties, and a fast entry into the counseling profession. I remember how scary it was before the first group, how exhausted we were after work for the whole first two years, and how inspired we were! We threw ourselves into it, heart and soul!
There was mediation training and my first solo and co-mediated cases.

There was my first experience of university teaching, which, fortunately, did not become my last, although everything was heading that way.

After defending my dissertation, I was overcome by an acute desire to write a long text that would not have such big (and strange) requirements imposed on it. I suggested to Lena, the co-founder of our project and my best companion, that we write a book about our group and the lives of the women who come to it. And she agreed. That is how we wrote a book. It has not been published yet, but it has definitely come together.

There were also less thrilling projects: three years ago it became clear that our project youarenotalone.su needed to become a separate legal entity, so we set up a non-profit, and I became its director. In its very first year I had to realize that this was a project I was leading, and had been leading for some time. I had the distinct feeling that I had not chosen this role, yet I had been performing it for a while, “unconsciously”, so to speak. After grieving over this, I started learning to do it better. And I am still learning.

All of this was very scary and very exciting at the same time.
And today it is clear that I need projects like these, that I would like to keep *starting*. So if you are interested in working with me, here is a list of my interests and secret wishes:

— writing non-fiction of various genres and scales (right now I want to start writing my own personal book; the big scale has come to seem like an exciting idea)
— leading people and projects in a field that at least borders on my areas of expertise
— conducting negotiations between people and groups of people
— doing any of the above in English
— teaching what I can do myself (psychological counseling and mediation, managing your life with everything it involves, in times of crisis and in periods of prolonged difficulty and illness)
— working as a talking head: hosting podcasts and interviews, giving expert commentary, facilitating/moderating group processes on a one-off or ongoing basis