Enter Aetheria.

Putting into words why specifically you love something is always a recipe for disaster. Love, like many emotions, is not logical, and not inherently understandable. At the end of the day, you can explain your reasoning for why, but you can’t transfer the connection that your logic makes to your emotions. But I’m going to try anyway. 

Because for years of my life, people have asked me the same questions. “Why don’t you monetize your apps?“, “Why don’t you leave your organization for an actual job that pays?”, “Why don’t you work for [insert massive but kinda evil tech company]?”, and most of all, “Why do you build the apps that you do?”. I can generally say, “because I went through the same thing and I don’t want it to happen to other people, and because I have that ability”. But to say it like that is to limit it, and to construe it in a way that loses the depth of the emotion I feel behind it.

I believe in the value of human life, and in rehabilitative/restorative justice to an almost naive degree. Even people who I completely disagree with, I value. Yes, even all of the edge cases you may be thinking of. To live is to have the ability to experience, and experience brings change. So in my mind, every person I meet, as far removed from my own value system as they might be, has the possibility to experience something that will change them in a better way. 

I was a bad person at one point. In a couple of years, I probably will think that I‘m a bad person now. But that’s the amazing things about humans - their capacity for change. No singular person is ever the same at any point in their life. You will never be the same person you were a second ago, nor will you be the same person you will be in a second from now. Change is constant, and consistent. Humans, literally by way of nature and science, are shapeshifters. 

In that way, I also believe in a strong social contract. We are only at the place with our technology that we are today because of centuries of work from our ancestors. We can’t repay our ancestors for what they did for us. We just have to pass it on, and continue our place in the social contract as a species who relies on collective power to stay alive. We build upon that social contract to repay debts we intrinsically owe just because of our ability to enjoy the comforts brought to us by their work. We don’t pay it back, we pay it forward. 

By some miracle, coincidence, or random mishap, I happened to be given a life where I have suffered immense trauma and illness, but I have also been gifted with platforms, friends, and the will to do something about it. I’m turning 19 this November, and it’s pretty much apparent that I’ve struggled with mental health issues for almost half of my life. I’ve experienced a lot mentally, and have experienced every facet of mental health treatment I was able to get my hands on. 

My experiences with the mental health system range from “generally bearable” to “how is this legal” to “you just saved my life“. I’ve sat in my guidance counselors office in the 7th grade because my friends told him I wanted to commit suicide. I missed almost every Monday of school for the first half of my sophomore year when I went to a physical high school to attend group therapy with other teenagers 2 hours away. I’ve been too broke to even afford to drive somewhere to cry and I’ve paid $160/hour for sessions with one of the best therapists in Southern California. 

I have wildly shifted in between all of these since I was young, and still at the edge of 18 diagnosed with C-PTSD (the most severe form of PTSD), I am still generally unable to access consistent mental health care that meets the level of care I need to actively continue to get better. I am here both because of the mental health care system in the US and in spite of it.  

Late last November, I started the throes of a two month long mental breakdown about abuse I had suffered in the past. From 2012-2019, I craved something so much that I assumed when it happened that I would forever be so grateful for it. And that the freedom of receiving it would be so healing, that every bad thing I had ever experienced would be gone by virtue of how amazing getting it was. 

That lofty goal was moving out of my parents’ house, becoming fully independent, and running the non-profit organization of my dreams - Astra Labs.

After a rough start to the year and getting rejected from multiple grants and fellowships for people under the age of 18, I was finally able to move out after taking an ill-fated job offer in June 2019. I signed my lease, and left everything I had known behind to start this life. 4 days after I moved into my 1 bedroom house, I formally started dating someone who was there for me during the rough patch at the beginning of 2019. We fell in love. Hard. 

I adopted my cat, Pumpkin Spice Latte, the next month. I was living the dream life I had always wanted. I had my first honest to god romantic relationship. I had a kitten. I was renting a one bedroom house in Orange County by myself at the age of 17, working two jobs doing work that I loved, and I was mentally at my peak. I had achieved almost all of the life goals I had before I turned 18. Except for the fact I was on the edge of crumbling constantly.

The circumstances had changed, but the PTSD stayed. I had awful paranoia whenever my ex was out of the house. I installed a security system to make sure that I had a line of defense. I couldn’t fall asleep on the 4th of July and stayed up crying all night because the fireworks had triggered a flashback episode and I had no way to deal with it. I was constantly trying to ignore the trauma pulling at the back of my brain by soothing it with general hushes of “you’ll be fine, you’re in a different place, you’re safe”. 

I had no time to transition from moving out of one of the worst phases of my life to moving into one of the best. I had gained everything I could have ever wanted. But everything that you gain is everything you could lose. I started getting into explosive fights with my partner that triggered panic attacks worse than I had ever had in my life. I was constantly drinking coffee and not eating food because I had completely lost any appetite. 

I was working incredibly long days and didn’t have the energy to have friendships. I was ignoring my parents because I didn’t know how to talk to them without dealing with the pain and betrayal I felt. I sealed myself off and told myself I should be happy for the fact that I was just out of there alive. 

But when Thanksgiving rolled around, I formally ended contact with my mom, and gave her back everything she owned that I was using. I went to thanksgiving with my partner’s family only to wake up the next morning from a call from my best friend saying all of my childhood belongings were left in her driveway. The entire rest of Thanksgiving was a mental blackout. So was the rest of November, and December.

During December, I had a massive speaking gig in Texas. I was keynoting with many amazing women, one including Tara Westover. Never before in my life had I reached out to a public figure to meet them, but as soon as she shared her family background, I messaged the conference organizer to ask if I could run to meet her. She was a blueprint. She was the key to figuring out how to just shut off what I was feeling and keep it at that. And walking with her to her book signing, I finally worked up the courage to ask her what I really wanted to know: how do you cope?

She just said - “therapy”. And that confirmed generally my worst fear. That there wasn’t a loophole, or a secret passage, or a day of realization. The only way out was through.

I grieved incredibly hard. I had to confront an incredibly obvious fact that I kept on pushing away in my pursuit of being stable enough to keep the life I created for myself. The trauma I went through had, on a permanent level, forever changed me. And it was not something a loving partner, or an orange cat, or a security system from Costco could change. 

On Christmas Eve, I drove myself to my favorite Italian place in Orange County and ordered the most amazing meal I could ever want as I thought about attempting suicide. On the way back home, I almost crashed on the I-5 from how hard I was crying.

And after getting a pay cut in half by my job in January, I spent almost $2000/month on EMDR and talk therapy to drive myself back from that edge. Only to be hit with a pandemic, and then losing that job, and then spending months working for Astra to make our COVID-19 response happen. (I am a volunteer for Astra Labs and do not take a salary)

But during that period of severe stress and dysfunction in my life, I restarted maladaptive daydreaming, a habit I picked up in middle school.I tried to come up with a way to visually conceptualize the absolute hell that PTSD is. I have always been a strongly visual person, and have always experienced thoughts and sensations as an ongoing “movie” in my head. It’s generally a series of images, sensations, temperatures, and sounds. I started having nightmares and daydreams about a world where my symptoms were visual, and I could fully point them out, battle them, and conceptualize what was mentally happening in my head as almost a playable game. 

I named this world Aetheria - a dystopian world version of my mind where mental illness was visible. While I was in that intense therapy from January to March, I talked about Aetheria with my therapists often. It was always playing in the back of my mind, like a movie. Whereas on my own, my C-PTSD was uncontrollable, in the context of Aetheria, it was playable. I could defeat it. And most of the coping tools that I gained from therapy ended up translating into Aetheria as physical objects, sensations, or sounds in my head. 

Aetheria, through that therapy, had gone from a world where my PTSD was ruling, to where I was able to understand, conceptualize, and defeat my PTSD in the form of a game. And for a solid chunk of time, I was studying game development on the side to transform Aetheria into the mental game into a physical game. In November and December, I wanted people to understand the pain. I wanted to have physical representations of my trauma. Of my pain. And of my fear. 

But by the end of therapy, Aetheria had become my baseline. It was my mental home. It was no longer a manifestation of my trauma, but rather everything I had built up to overcome it. Aetheria wasn’t my trauma, but it was my passenger in helping me defeat it. 

The most crucial part of therapy for me was not the things I discovered along the way, but the tools it gave me to build my own safety net. It gave me the ability to be stable even when I was fluctuating in and out of the mental health care system, in a way that would have emotionally crushed me years ago. 

But when Astra initiated our COVID-19 response, the entire team saw the absolute hell that I experienced: trying to get mental health care while broke in the US. We had AnxietyHelper, a relatively paired down app that was the first thing I ever developed. But this new challenge of people being at the end of their savings, unable to access physical help, and being trapped at home hit us with a need that we never could’ve anticipated. 

Even though it wasn’t a relatively great app or anything too impossible to recreate, we understood what people were using AnxietyHelper for. It was their baseline. It was their tool to use because they were unable to access anything else. It was their safety net. Just like Aetheria was for me.

And as we sat there, completely hit with demand and stacked with obstacles, we realized what we had to do. We were one of the only non-profits that worked exclusively through software and as a remote team before the pandemic, so we had the structure ready for what happened. But what we didn’t know was what we could do next. And as we sat, emotionally completely drained from response work, I sketched out a simple app concept of what was my baseline - Aetheria itself. 

The idea simply started off as “library full of tools for mentally ill people to do whatever with“, and it snowballed from there into the app that we launch today: a mental illness management app that serves 20+ mental illnesses, and 30+ tools. Always free. Always accessible. To become people’s safety net for whatever they face. 

To build Aetheria has been emotionally, the ultimate act of fulfilling the social contract. I would go through what I went through from November - April over, and over, and over again if it meant that just one person was to benefit from it. Just like I have benefited immensely from years of mental health advocates and women in STEM, this is my contribution to our future. 

I have spent years creating, and months perfecting my own safety net to cope with the inaccessibility of mental health treatment. And now, our team gets to share these tools with you for you to build your own baseline, and your own safety net. 

We can’t fix the mental health system, but we can hold your hand while you navigate it. 

I built this for everyone because I love them. Because I believe in them. And because even though I don’t know them or their future, I believe the fact they’re alive to use it is enough reason for me to put time into making sure they get there safely. 

Just as the people before me deinstitutionalized the US, and made massive leaps in the accessibility for health care because they wanted better for me, I’m building this because I have experienced things that I don’t want them to experience. And I believe in them, and their ability to change, grow. And to take this and get to the future they’re meant to have.

I experienced this hell of not being able to have any stable footing mentally. And I want to make it so they don’t have to, because I have the ability to. And on that note, my answer to the question “why do you build these apps“ is:

If you had the ability to enable access to things that many people who shared similar struggles with you had died without, wouldn’t you? 

Wouldn’t you do it to honor their memory?

Wouldn’t you do it so the future generation never has to fully understand the struggles they built their life upon? 

If you had the ability to change things for the people who loved you in the past, and the people you will love in the future, wouldn’t you try? 

I did. Enter Aetheria.