I started working on the Change Exchange in 2013, two years after the launch of BrightRock. In that time, my life has changed beyond recognition.

I started as a married, home-owning woman with very small children, and have transformed into a single, renting, sober mother of young adults.

I have closed businesses, changed careers, entered a 12-step recovery programme. I have found myself, and I have learned to love the person I found. I am happier than I have ever been.

The Change Exchange has been with me every step of the way. It has been my most consistent revenue stream, often being the invoice that kept a roof over my head.

It has given me a space to share my experiences of everything from online dating to perimenopause to my son showing me a world beyond toxic masculinity. It has been a home in which to grow, and it has allowed me to do so.

It started as an exciting idea. We were to build an online space to contain stories of change from everyday people, humans with experiences that reflected our own, who were mostly just trying to get through the next thing without falling apart.

The plan was for small, familiar stories. Nothing grand. The story of the chicken at Christmas, the visit to a granny, the child who returns home, the hot yoga class, or the slow, whimpering end of a marriage.

I have seen how our writers — “change agents”, as we call them — have grown and evolved too, in the various change moments of life.

Starting a Job, Tying the Knot, Building a Home, Raising a Family. We have life stories that span over a decade. They become part of our world.

Writing is one of the best ways I know how, next to dancing it out and chatting over tea with my best friends, to work though the big stuff of my life.

Annoyingly, I struggle to write without an audience so journalling doesn’t come easy to me. The chances I have to write for the Change Exchange are moments of reflection that help me make sense of what is happening.

I have a sense that I am part of a community of writers and readers, all of us trying to work out who we are becoming.

I have read stories of people getting sober, losing husbands, having longed-for babies, losing longed-for babies, learning how to love longed-for babies when they become teenagers, going on holiday, dating, falling in love, falling out of love. In a word, living.

Our stories are about people living and figuring out how to change in the face of change.

It is a privilege to watch others grow and to give them a space for their stories. It’s heartfelt work. I love it.