I didn't come to journaling because my life was calm and orderly. I came to it because it was a total, chaotic mess, even if at times it looked like I had what everybody else wanted.
I grew up in a house where love was an unpredictable visitor — addiction was in the room far more often than not, and a stepfather ruled through fear rather than care. 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 pure anger. Honestly? Anger is a fantastic fuel. When nothing else could, it got me out of bed for 5:00 AM workouts, run advertising for some of America's biggest brands, and speak in front of hundreds of people about their marketing.
Anger is ridiculously efficient — it doesn't ask you to feel the heavy stuff underneath; it just demands that you move. The only problem is that anger is an expensive fuel to run on forever. Eventually, your engine burns out.
So began my long, slightly absurd, and deeply humbling quest for meaning. I didn't search in just one sensible place; I looked in practically every extreme corner of the earth I could find. I sat in dark rooms with shamans in South America. I sweated out bad decisions in Lakota ceremony lodges. I sat completely alone on a desolate hill for three days with zero food and zero water, waiting for some profound 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, yet never quite stopped talking to whatever might be listening. I devoured hundreds of self-help, philosophy, business, and spiritual books. I met incredible, inspiring people who gave me invaluable 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 those things was the single magic cure. But all of them together pointed toward one quiet, undeniable constant: outward achievements and cultural noise cannot replace internal truth.
Underneath the sweat lodges, the high-stakes meetings, the therapy sessions, the 5:00 AM runs, the heartbreak, and the existential dread, there was only one practice that consistently kept me tethered to reality: writing it down.
Not writing to publish. Not writing to perform. Not writing to optimize a daily routine for an audience. Just writing to catch the truth before it dissolved. To have 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 press on a keyboard.
I am not here to tell you that I'm completely "fixed." I don't think that's how life works. But my life is measurably, undeniably better — and journaling was the single grounding habit that showed up for every version of me along the way: the angry survivor, the driven entrepreneur, the exhausted seeker, and the person who is sometimes a scared and hurt little boy finally showing up.
That is why I built Haumm.
Haumm isn't here to turn you into a hyper-productive robot or force you into toxic positivity. It's not a place to perform. It's just a quiet, grounded sanctuary to keep telling yourself the truth — 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. And my hope is you catch lightning in a bottle, some say a spark of the divine, and live well.
Welcome to Haumm. Pull up a page and let's write it down.
— Kit
Maker of Haumm | haumm.com