The First Year

There is a kind of year that some readers will recognize from their own lives. It is the year in which the assumptions about how the rest of your life would go stop being true, fast, and not in the way you had braced for. It is the year in which the questions you had treated as theoretical—what does attachment really mean, what is the substrate of a relationship, what happens to a person when the relational ground gives way—stop being theoretical. The questions move from books on a shelf to the room you are sitting in at four in the morning.

I had been working in technology and product leadership for more than fifteen years when that year happened to me. I had read attachment theory. I had read the trauma literature. I had thought about relationships, professionally and personally, for a long time. None of it prepared me for the year. What the year did was take everything I had read and force it into a different shape: the shape of something that had to be lived through, not merely understood.

By March 2025 I was on the other side of the worst of it, in the sense that some days were possible again. I was not on the other side of the substrate the year had left behind. I was carrying something I did not yet know what to do with.

What I started doing, in March, was building what would eventually become Wouch. The platform did not begin as a startup. It began as a long document written in a notebook about the questions I needed to answer for myself: how relationships work, what makes them survivable, what makes them generative, and what conditions are necessary to actually be in one. The document became a research framework. The research framework became a prototype. The prototype became a team. The team became Wouch Labs, incorporated in October 2025.

I am writing this piece because I want readers to understand that the substrate of Wouch is not abstract. It is the result of one person trying to answer questions that became impossible to keep at a distance. The platform you are reading about is built from those questions. The carefulness, the slowness, the refusal to engineer dependence, the insistence on user agency—these are not marketing choices. They are the choices a person makes after encountering what happens when those values are absent from a system that should have contained them.

I am also writing this because I do not want readers to imagine that Wouch is built by people who stand above the work the platform addresses. The opposite is true. The platform is built by people who are in the work. The clinical roster is in the work. The trauma-informed reviewers are in the work. The team is in the work. The founder is in the work.

That is not a credential. It is, I have come to think, a precondition. Platforms in this category that were built by people who were not in the work often reveal that fact in their design, incentives, and assumptions. I have tried to build a different kind of platform.

Whether I have succeeded remains an open question. This essay is part of the substrate from which that question can be answered.