I've been trying to figure out when exactly I started building Lumi and when I started needing it. I'm not sure those two things have a clean chronological order.
The idea behind Lumi is something like: a tool that helps people understand themselves better. Not in a self-help way exactly. More in the way that having somewhere to track your patterns — what you're feeling, what keeps recurring, what you're learning about how you react to things — gives you a more honest relationship with yourself over time. A mirror with memory, if that makes sense.
I started building it because I thought it was a gap in what existed. And it is. But the more I've sat with it, the more I realize I was also building it because I was someone who needed that kind of mirror. Not in an inspirational way. In a practical one. I was going through a period where a lot of things I'd assumed about myself and about my relationships turned out to be incomplete, and I didn't have a great system for sitting with that.
There's something uncomfortable about building a product that is designed to help people develop self-awareness when you are, in the middle of building it, developing your own. It means that the questions you're designing into the product are also the questions you're asking yourself. When you're writing prompts meant to help someone examine a pattern in their relationships, you're probably also examining a pattern in your relationships. When you're thinking about how to help someone notice when their emotional responses don't quite match the situation, you're also trying to notice that in yourself.
I didn't expect the product to function as its own version of therapy for me. But here we are.
There were moments where I'd be working on a feature — something about tracking how you feel across interactions with different people, or something about logging the gap between what you say you want and what you keep choosing — and I'd stop, because I was actually sitting with a version of that question about my own life. Not abstractly. Concretely. The feature I was designing existed because I had the problem it was meant to solve.
I'm not sure what to do with that exactly. Part of me thinks it's a good sign — that if I've experienced the need this deeply, then the design decisions I make will be more grounded than if I were solving a problem at a distance. Part of me wonders if building something this close to your own experience introduces a bias that's hard to see.
What I keep coming back to is that some of the best products I've encountered feel like the creator was also the first user. Not in the sense that they built exactly what they personally wanted and assumed everyone else would want the same thing. But in the sense that they understood the need from the inside. The frustration was real. The gap was something they'd lived in before they decided to try to close it.
With Lumi, I was living in the gap long before I named it. I was the person who could hold a conversation with someone for three hours and come away uncertain about what I actually felt. The person who would say they were fine and then be surprised, later, by how much they weren't. The person who kept making the same mistakes in relationships not because they were unintelligent about them but because the mistakes existed just below the level of conscious awareness, where they were hard to catch in real time.
I don't think Lumi is going to fix any of that, for me or for anyone else. I'm skeptical of tools that promise to transform you. What I think it can do is make things more visible. Give you a slightly better chance of catching the pattern before it plays out again. Offer a place to be honest about what's happening rather than waiting until hindsight makes it obvious.
Whether I can build that well is still an open question. Whether I understand the problem well enough to translate it into something useful for people who aren't me — that I'm still figuring out. The product is still early. There's a lot I don't know about what it needs to be.
But I know why I started it. And that part I'm clear on, even when the rest is uncertain.
I think the honest version of this is: I'm building something about understanding yourself better, during a time when I needed to understand myself better. That's the whole story. It doesn't need more explanation than that.
Sometimes the thing you decide to build is the thing that was already trying to get built — by the questions you keep asking, the problems you keep running into, the pattern you keep living through and not quite making sense of.
Lumi is that, for me. I just made it public.