The long way here

I didn't come to journaling because my life was calm and orderly. I came to it because it was a mess, even when it looked like I was doing life well.

I grew up in a house where love was an unpredictable visitor. Addiction, violence and toxic behavior were in the room far more often than not. Neglect doesn't always look like absence. Sometimes it looks like someone standing right in front of you and still not seeing you. I learned early how to read a room to survive it, and spent the next thirty years learning how to actually inhabit one.

For a long time, I ran on anger. Anger is a fantastic fuel. When nothing else could, it got me out of bed for 5:00 AM workouts, pushed me to run advertising for some of America's biggest brands, and put me on stages in front of hundreds of people talking about marketing.

Anger is efficient. It doesn't ask you to feel the heavy stuff underneath; it just demands that you move. The only problem is that it's an expensive fuel to run on forever. And when you chase one big dream of success that hard, the little things that really make up a life, and make it beautiful, get lost along the way, unnurtured. Eventually, your engine burns out.

So began my long, slightly absurd quest for meaning. I didn't search in one sensible place; I looked in nearly every extreme corner I could find. I sat in dark rooms with shamans in South America. I sweated out bad decisions in Lakota ceremony lodges. I sat alone on a desolate hill for three days and nights with no food and no water, waiting for a cosmic revelation that wasn't just my own hungry, restless mental noise. I grew up Christian, drifted away, spent a solid decade furious at God, and never quite stopped talking to whatever might be listening. I read hundreds of self-help, philosophy, business and spiritual books. I met people who gave me real pieces of the puzzle. And I went to therapy, thought I might be good, realized I wasn't even close, and promptly went back again.

None of it was the cure. But all of it pointed the same direction: I kept looking outside myself for something that was only ever going to show up from the inside.

Underneath the sweat lodges, the high-stakes meetings, the therapy sessions, the 5:00 AM runs, the heartbreak and the existential dread, there was one practice that kept me tethered: writing it down.

Not writing to publish. Not writing to perform. Not writing to optimize a routine for an audience. Just writing to catch the truth before it dissolved. To find some sliver of a North Star. To keep an unfiltered record of what I was actually carrying, on the days I could tell the truth and on the days I could barely hold a pen or type a sentence. It was also how I never fully lost touch with the little things. Even in the years I wasn't looking after them, they kept turning up on the page, waiting for me to notice.

I'm not here to tell you I'm "fixed." I don't think that's how life works. Life comes in seasons. There are stretches when you're the productive one, with a list for everything, stretches somewhere in the middle, and stretches when you're helpless and a little crazy. There's a fall and a winter in it, and a twenty-year-old and a forty-year-old who'd hardly recognize each other. My life is undeniably better, and journaling showed up for every version of me along the way: the angry survivor, the driven entrepreneur, the exhausted seeker.

And the scared, hurt little boy I'm finally showing up for.

I needed something that could go through every one of those seasons with me. That is why I built Haumm.

Haumm isn't here to turn you into a productivity machine or ask you to be positive all the time. It's not a place to perform. It's a quiet, grounded place to keep telling yourself the truth in every season, on the good days, the dark days and the completely ordinary ones, until one day you look back and the pages add up to a life you actually recognize.

Maybe, somewhere in there, you catch a little lightning. Some call it a spark of the divine. I hope you find it, and live well.

Welcome to Haumm. Pull up a page and let's write it down.

— Kit
Maker of Haumm