What made you want to be a therapist? If you don't mind answering.
the short answer is i was good at listening to people and understanding their feelings as a kid, and when we were all getting to be teenagers, my friends came to me for me to hear out their problems and give them a second opinion. and at some point i realized, oh, people do this for a living, maybe that should be what i do? and then later i took a psychology class for the first time and was like “yeah i could see myself devoting the rest of my life to this field”
the long answer involves child abuse and learning how to get good at listening and understanding the emotions behind what people said so i could stand between my parents and try to mediate between them when they argued, and so i could predict which things i said or did would set off my mother, and believing it was my responsibility to fix my family because, well, neither of the adults appeared to be smart enough to understand anyone else’s feelings, and surely, if they could, they’d be able to just talk things out, so the least i could do is try to walk them through it.
what keeps me doing it now that i’ve been doing it for a year is that when people want to change, and you can help them do it, that’s the best feeling in the world. and also, because there are so few therapists who are even competent to work with trans people, let alone who are trans themselves, and if i can’t have a cool trans therapist to mentor me through the transitioning process, i can at least be that to others someday