When I was 11, on the first day of secondary school, my form tutor asked us to write down on a piece of paper some facts about ourselves. He was going to keep the pieces of paper until the last day of school. We wrote down who we fancied, our favourite musicians (a term that might be a bit generous to describe S Club Juniors) and what we wanted to be when we grew up. I wrote down that I wanted to be an agony aunt - like the ones in nineties and noughties magazine columns. Now, being a therapist isn't exactly that, but it's not far off! It took me a while to get there though. I started with volunteering at a weekly support group at The Stroke Association, then the Friday night shifts at Childline, then Saturday mornings at rape crisis before I eventually did my masters degree in integrative counselling and psychotherapy. There was a five year stop gap between my Psychology undergrad and masters, where I worked for a wonderful leadership development company that existed within the NHS. I worked in admin and mostly created registration lists and booked venues for conferences, but I was lucky to attend tonnes of workshops and events delivered by renowned leadership experts. After I'd done checking people in, I was pretty much able to sit at the back and absorb the lessons from afar. I think being armed with the combo pack of the fulfilment psychotherapy brings me, the inspiration from my time in leadership development and just a little bit of punky rebellion meant that it was inevitable that something like The Offload Project CIC would come to exist. I set up Offload in 2022 - a service providing low cost, long term counselling and psychotherapy for the people of Nottinghamshire. Since then, we've recruited and developed 45 trainee psychotherapists, conducted just under 4000 hours worth of therapy appointments, ran three group support courses and seen 316 independent clients (I'm writing this in May 2024). Offload has been the most intensive, immersive learning journey I could have ever given myself. I'm proud of it every day!