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1,000 words from others...
...and a few words from me about my important others.
I think we were lucky to work with you as you brought wittiness and creativity, while being at the same time open to a discussion. It can be said that you did a vast ammount of work by finding an approach to organising the trully volumnous material that has to be rationalised in [such] training modules. The resultant content has all chances to produce a flexible textbook [that can be of use to] variously attuned trainers and for [user] groups with different needs. ----Director Social Programme, Bulgaria.
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I found our talk very inspiring. Thank you again.----Women Leadership Development Coach, International.
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Your work is super-inspiring. ---Organisational Psychologist, International Business Development
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[I]t has been a long time since I have been in touch, but you will be pleased to know that [our organisation] is still going strong, although [this type of work] in [our county] is experiencing cuts and a good deal of change at the moment. The [evaluative action research] project we did with you has helped us a great deal in building on our confidence about our therapeutic direction, and in helping us to show others how important and successful our work is. In particular, our therapeutic work has gone from strength to strength and is having a really positive impact on [the lives of the children we work with]. [...] [H]ope you continue to find the achievement and success your efforts deserve. [...] You are fondly remembered and the time and effort you have devoted to us have been extremely important for us, our [clients], and ultimately [the children we work with]. We all make a contribution to helping them make the most out of life, and your involvement with us has certainly contributed to this. [...] Thanks again for your support and remarkable insight into our world. ---Local Authority Service Lead, UK
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I've only worked with you for a short while and have enjoyed your wit and insight alongside your capacity to merge the political and psychodynamic in what you bring to the discussion.---Researcher and Consultant, UK
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I have always enjoyed working with you and I continually found our conversations inspiring and thought-provoking. In embracing and utilising creative and visual thinking you have brought an exciting and powerful dynamic to our work. --- Artist and Consultant, international
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I’ve immensely enjoyed working with you and getting to know you over the last few years, particularly on our talk [...] and the conversations that went into that. [A]nd please do keep me in the loop with your various groups and plans – I also enjoyed the politics and psychoanalysis group albeit, as you once put it “this seems a little radical for you”. ---Researcher and Consultant, UK
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I have valued [your] approach, which invites the other to be playful and creative and pushes the group beyond the boundary of a reflective space. [Your] stance to consultancy attends to the mind as well as the heart to consider how emotions and experiences can be understood by a variety of approaches to enable unblocking of processes & consider ones’ relatedness to the task, role and responses to authority [...]I would really like to thank you for your input which would be greatly missed by us. Your support in holding the service at a very difficult time is much appreciated.---NHS Service Lead, UK
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You’ve done some great work – and much more to come, I can feel it in my heart.---NGO Leader, UK
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It’s been a pleasure and enlightening to work with you, Milena. We’ll miss your unique angle to looking at working life and your strong theoretical understanding. I wish you every success in your future work and expect it, too.---Researcher and Consultant, UK
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It has been a pleasure working with you [...] and I have been curious to know how your projects have developed.---Group Relations Consultant, Blogger and Writer, UK
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Working alongside you greatly inspired and influenced me to explore further in depth the relationship children have with their wider environment and how this too can influence their lives and shape development in a positive way.I wish you every success in your new venture. Keep caring!---Social Work Practice Consultant (therapeutic)
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I have valued our relationship and would like to imagine ways in which we might continue to work together. ---Practitioner working on male trauma, homelessness and crime, UK
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I hope there will be the possibility to cooperate again, it would be great. ---Business Association Lead, Italy
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A privilege to work with you.---Child Development Social Worker, UK
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It was a [pleasure] for me to share some part of this journey with you. [E]ven if it was a short one, this fascinating path that we have shared, I have to say that talking to you about different projects - it was [an] experience of learning. ---Group Relations Practitioner, Argentina
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When I first met Milena at the Tavistock we immediately connected and shared stories of defeat, suffering, struggle, loss, about women who have found their way out of the depths. I was immediately struck about her sensitivity, compassion, gentleness and talent to connect me to other colleagues in this difficult field! Thank You!---Trauma Researcher, Germany
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I’m quite confident that we will collaborate again, sooner or later, as you have always shown a great way of cooperating with many colleagues across disciplines, organisations, perspectives and countries. [...] I wanted to thank you for all these years of comradery, supporting the international and gender perspectives, not only in EU projects, but in the whole range [of work] from [incubating programmes] to difficult proposals and even more difficult projects, for lovely speeches and for your special attention to details and colleagues’ wellbeing no matter what. ---Researcher and Consultant, UK
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Your work on [our acute states ward] was very much appreciated by the staff and has inspired further developments aimed at opening spaces for thinking and support.---Consultant Psychiatrist, UK
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I´m happy to hear you are starting a new project by yourself with all your expertise and enthusiasm. Please keep in touch. May the Force be with you :-) ---Violence Against Women Researcher, Spain
It is an honour to have received their consent to publish some of the testimonials of my clients and collaborators. Their words of appreciation are the measure of the standards that I aspire to maintain and upgrade. Their ethics, professionalism, responsibility and dedication are the standards I expect from my future clients and collaborators, too.
Levinas says that man does not meet, man is the meeting, and this is perhaps even more so for a woman. I am who I am because of my meeting the other and, maybe, the universe half way, as Karen Barad puts it, in encounters and events as well as in entanglements.
I am therefore immensely grateful first and foremost to my parents and my sister for their generosity and unconditional love which have built up my beautiful parts, and I mean those parts born in my commitment to justice, beauty and truth working together for a better world.
My mother, in particular, has taught me to never turn a blind eye to injustice and that the only people I should really fear are not my enemies nor my friends, but the indifferent. Her bottomless and miraculous well of songs with lyrics for even the tiniest occasion have brightened billions of moments.
My nephew and niece have taught me how to love, how to be peaceful, creative and how to understand the world better. They have fostered the ways I adhere to principles of an ethics of care and the ways to be genuine and honest. I am particularly grateful for my nephew teaching me to play computer games and for liking all my feminist facebook posts; and to my niece for bringing me back to my childhood when I was inventing games and especially for teaching me to sing after she assessed that I don't sing because I can't .
My friends and relatives are my water of love together with my immediate family, they are my precious island of joy and an endless source of illuminating personal, intellectual (and not that intellectual) conversations and experiences.
Perhaps this is also the place to thank my therapists, Galya Petrova and Maggie Cohen - I don't know what they were doing with me, but I think it worked at the end.
I am thankful to my ex-partner who loved the thinker and the feminist in me and thus made them grow enough to thrive without him.
I am also indebted to my supervisors and mentors Prof. Robert Fine, Prof. Dontcho Gradev, Dr Kimon Ganev, Dr Alberto Hahn, Dr Mannie Sher and Prof. Steve Fuller - not only for surviving my idealisations of them (and my creative ramblings) but for living and working to the standard.
It would not be fair to miss from this list key leaders of the organisations I have worked with - Nadejda Stoytcheva, Maria Tchomarova, Nadia Kozhouharova, Katya Krastanova, Dr Eliat Aram and Judith Mudd. Organisations are not brothers in arms, but these women are true soldiers and I have been honoured to have had glorious battles in the social realm with them by my side. By coincidence or not, most of them are my older sister's age - herself a soldier of love.
There are people in between, to call them "comrades", "like-minded collaborators" or what we call in Bulgarian "съмишленици" - my brothers and sisters in arms who make me believe there is meaning in what we do together, a meaning which goes beyond just work.
Special thanks should go to the artists in my life Juliet Scott, Stoyan Stefanov, Javor Vatchkov and Sam Nightingale, my humble teachers in tenderness and joy who are perhaps even not aware of the influence they had on me and walking the longest mile to connect with my creativity.
Finally, I should be thankful for all the learning from the evil in people and the world that revealed itself to me in close encounters - it taught me to accept not, to forget not, to regret not, to lament not but to try and understand, and - when I fail - to try harder.
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