Hey there,
I’m Anna, 19 years young, ok not quite, but very nearly. I have almost hit the last year of being a teen, cue celebration dances. Because when you hit twenty, everything changes, right? Spots vanish, mood swings even out, love becomes an easy game to play and life becomes one long picnic, or that’s the dream isn’t it? In this blog, I’ll be writing about my somewhat different adolescence.
You may be curious as to the title of my blog (teenage coach), it should have a space, but you know what online URLs are like, they didn’t even let me space it with a hyphen or an underscore, fascists! I’ll tell you about the grammatically incorrect username after giving you a little information about me. Hopefully, it won’t be too long, it certainly shouldn’t be but Leona Lewis is managing an autobiography and she’s not much older than me!
I was born one early January morning in 1990 to a then record producer and his artist wife, just outside London. Soon after my appearance earth side, my father quit the music business. My birth and the subsequent death of his own father had initiated a chain reaction within him that made him see that in fact, he wanted to be there for my mother and me. So leaving the crazy hours and spoilt musicians behind, dad became a gardener. On Friday, he was mixing his final record, the following Monday, driving the family Nova with a lawn-mower in the car-boot to his first garden.
My blonde and in every other way opposite to me, sister Sophie joined us a couple of years later. Hazy memories of these years, obviously, although happy ones. Holidays in the west country with the grandparents, playing with Sophie, good days at school, the occasional bad day. Play-tent, Sooty, Blue Peter, Toby Anstis, John Major, (with whom I had a curious obsession) and the rest. I was blissfully unaware of the challenges that my parents faced with a mortgage and their landscaping company. The next thing that I was aware of, was that my father had a very bad sore throat and couldn’t speak. For days this went on, days that bled into weeks, then months turned into a year.
It was through this health crisis that my parents had their St Paul on the Road to Damascus moment. We moved into rented accommodation, they closed their little garden shop and Arcadia Landscaping. Determined not to go to the doctor for his throat, ma and pa decided to look into ‘alternative and ‘complementary medicine’. They’d been going to a homeopath for a few years, but this was still a completely new world to them, one that led them to learning meditation, flower remedies, Scott M Peck and many other now well known clichés of the self-help market. Back then, it was all very new and radical, especially in our square Surrey town.
’96 saw the full recovery of dad, without any medical intervention. Picking up on all the family change, I had no desire to go into the last year of my primary school. Recently introduced through copious reading to the work of Rudolf Steiner, my mother decided to take us all to visit Michael Hall, a school started by the aforementioned Austrian philosopher.
Whether it was the proximity to Winnie the Pooh’s ’hood, the fairytale mansion or the sweeping grounds of the school, I fell completely in love. With very little fuss or hype and the respect that my parents have always endeavoured to give my sister and me, we were enrolled for the following term. At the beginning of ’97, we moved from the near stifling normalcy of Surrey to a green roofed house in Forest Row. The international, buzzing community that must be as far from normal as it is possible to be, although we all co-exist peacefully with the many muggles that also inhabit this Sussex village.
The years at Michael Hall and living in Michael Fields guaranteed my sister and I an idyllic childhood. Yes the classic kind of childhood that certain newspapers are campaigning to bring back, as if it died with the dodo. It’s certainly an endangered species, but not altogether as extinct as well-meaning, older generations would have you believe.
Having quit the landscaping, my parents became intuitive counsellors, life-coaches, authors and general practitioners of radical and alternative lifestyle, without trying to make them sound too guru-like. Both have worked from home since 1997, coaching people suffering from cancer to those going through divorce. A different lifestyle to many of our contemporaries that has meant we have always had our parents there, with certain sacrifice on their side, although Sophie and I have never gone without.
At the age of eleven, I felt suffocated at Michael Hall and needed a change. I wanted something new and ‘home education’ that my mother occasionally mentioned (never really believing that either my sister or I would actually take up on it) held such strong appeal that I decided I wanted to try it.
So out my sister and I came to try what we would later call ‘radical unschooling’. The term home education or worse home-schooling implies being taught by your mother pretending to be a Victorian governess. Of course, that was our first term, but then mum and dad decided that we should be trusted to lead our own education. So of course the term: Radical unschooling applies much more, because of course Sophie and I in our new freedom, revelled like pigs in mud.
A brief summary of our early unschooling years: initiating the local area’s home education circle, helping out at the local farm, puppetry, wood-work, French, sailing, wind-surfing, English, drama, childcare, biology, astrology, beach trips, camping trips, Buddhist festival, art, music, psychology, caring for the elderly and most important for my sister and I: playing. We played for years, rebuilding a relationship that had been left in tatters by our school induced separation.
The years pass, suddenly I’m travelling like I’d always wanted to do: Germany, France, Holland, France (again), Hawaii*, Italy, France (yet again), Canada, America, Ireland, Portugal, Italy and Ireland. Does it count if they’re duplicates? If it does, my footprint is looking about the size of a yeti’s, ouch! And I like to think of myself as a conscious, switched on kinda gal, as far as environmentalism is concerned.
Other than travelling, I have worked for The Mother magazine (pieces for which I will put up over the next few days, cheaty blogs you see) and its ex publishing company: The Art of Change, which happens to be run by my parents. I know, it’s who you know, not what you know. I have also completed a freelance journalism and feature writing course, honours diploma, which along with a couple of GCSEs and Driving License are the extent of my qualifications. I’ve also produced and performed in a number of Am-Dram events, worked in two cafés, at a charity shop and by and large have had a blast, despite zits, falling in love with all the wrong boys and experienced the universal soap opera that is adolescence.
Recently, I began a life-coach course with mum and dad. Spot the word coach in there? Good. No honours degree in that for me yet, however, I am already learning the basics and for target practice, sorry I mean for your benefit and my own, I would like to offer my services as a teenage coach. They use a great model known as NRCS, pronounced nawks, and it is a radical way to communicate. It’s definitely changed the way I deal with relationships and myself, so I can recommend it without too much bias. Being still in my teens, I am probably more able to relate to adolescent issues than your average ‘shrink’ or ‘coach’ and maybe that is equally valid to having many years of life experience. It is of course up to you to make that decision, suffice to say that I would love to hear from you if you are in need of a listening ear or a different way to respond in relationships.
I look forward to hearing from you. My email address is anna90 @ live .co.uk < strangely spaced to avoid spambots! Evil things. Comments are welcome.
Namaste
Anna
*I happen to be a massive U2 fan. The Irish band have been a big part of my life in recent years. A friend of mine said once that he believed all teens needed to have at least one insane obsession. U2 happen to be mine and before you go kidding yourself that’s sane and healthy compared to say doing crack; you should probably know, they were the reason for my 20,000 mile round trip to Hawaii.
