Why I'm Building a Journaling App That Even I Can't Read

Before I tell you what I built, I want to tell you why.

For most of my life, I didn't really talk about what was going on inside my head. Not the hard parts. Not the stuff that actually weighed on me. Like a lot of men, I grew up with a quiet, unspoken rule: keep it together, sort it out yourself, don't put any of it on anyone else. Anxiety, mental health, the slow-accumulating worry that quietly shapes how you move through your day. That stayed private. Especially from the people closest to me.

The problem is, private doesn't mean gone. It just means it sits inside you, getting heavier, while you smile through your week.

Then COVID Happened

During that stretch, a few people I knew well, people I genuinely thought were among the strongest I knew, took their own lives.

I'm not going to pretend I understood what they were carrying. I didn't. That's exactly the point. None of us did. These were the kind of people you'd look at and assume they had everything figured out. They didn't. And we didn't know. And now they're gone.

That hit me harder than I knew how to process at the time.

At the same time, I was inside my own version of the same fog. Job uncertainty. Money worries. Watching the property ladder pull a little further out of reach every month. Quiet anxiety about whether the path I was on was actually leading anywhere. Nothing dramatic. Nothing I would have brought up over dinner. Just the slow, building weight that millions of people are carrying right now and don't know what to do with.

The Moment I Started Writing

I started writing. Not to anyone. Not for anyone. Just getting things out of my head and onto a screen. Every worry. Every what if. Every fear I'd been carrying around for months and never said out loud.

And something strange happened.

When the words were sitting in front of me instead of bouncing around inside me, the things that had been overwhelming started to look... smaller. More defined. I could finally see what was actually causing me pain, instead of just feeling the shape of it. Patterns I couldn't see while I was inside them became obvious on the page.

It didn't fix anything overnight. But for the first time in a long time, the weight had somewhere to go that wasn't my own chest.

That was the moment InnerSight started, even though I didn't know it yet.

Why My Notes App Wasn't Enough

The thing was, the notes app I was using wasn't right. It was synced everywhere. Visible to whatever apps I'd given permissions to over the years. Sitting in some cloud I didn't control. The stuff I was writing, the things I'd never said out loud, was just sitting there. Backed up. Searchable. One careless screenshot or shared screen away from being seen by someone else.

So I started thinking about what a journal would actually look like if it was built for the kind of writing that helps. Not a pretty UI. Not productivity. Not streaks or gamification. A place you could put the worst version of your thoughts and trust they were yours.

Who I Built This For

That's what I started building. Honestly, I built it for myself first. But the longer I worked on it, the more I realised I probably wasn't the only one. There are a lot of people, men in particular but not only men, who don't have a safe place to put what they're carrying. Who need somewhere private to think before they're ready to say any of it out loud.

That's who this is for.

Mathematically Safe, Not 'Trust Us' Safe

Here's the part I had to get right. If I'm asking you to write down something you've never told another person, something you've barely admitted to yourself, then I had better be sure those words are actually safe. Not 'good security practices' safe. Mathematically safe.

So I made one decision early that shaped every decision after it: I should not be able to read your entries. Ever. Not if I wanted to. Not if I were compelled to. Here's how that actually works in practice:

• Your phone encrypts everything before it leaves it. Before a single word touches the internet, it's encrypted with AES-256, the same standard banks and governments use. At rest, entries are stored encrypted in my database and unreadable to me.
• Your passphrase is the only key, and I never see it. It's run through Argon2id, a modern password-hashing algorithm, to derive your encryption key. That key exists only on your device. I don't store the passphrase. Not in a database, not in logs, not anywhere.
• Your device protects the key with hardware. Once unlocked, the key lives in the iOS Keychain, the same secure enclave that protects Apple Pay. Turn on Face ID or Touch ID, and your journal sits behind your biometrics too.
• Almost everything personal is encrypted. Entry titles and content, conversations with the in-app companion, AI-generated insights, themes and emotion analysis, your name, your goals, your reflections. If it's personal, it's encrypted before it ever leaves your device.
• Defence in depth. Everything in transit uses HTTPS/TLS. The database enforces row-level security, so even within my own infrastructure, your data is isolated to your account. There is no admin who can browse user content, because there is no admin who can read user content.

If You Forget Your Passphrase, I Can't Get Your Entries Back

Not "I won't." I can't. The math doesn't allow it. Your data is encrypted with a key derived from a passphrase that only exists in your head. There is no override switch on my side.

So when someone resets their passphrase, the app permanently deletes their existing entries as part of the reset.

I know how that sounds. The first reaction from almost everyone I've spoken to is some version of: "Surely you could just let people email support and get it back?"

Technically? Yes. But the second I build that, I've built a backdoor. And a backdoor for you is a backdoor for:

• Anyone who phishes your account
• Anyone who subpoenas my company
• Anyone who breaches my support tools
• Any future version of me with worse intentions

A journal that someone other than you might be able to read isn't a private journal. It's a diary with extra steps.

So I made the trade. Real privacy, with real responsibility. You hold the key. You also hold the consequences.

I think that's the only honest version of "your journal is yours."

The Opposite of Where AI Is Headed

Every app is racing to be more "intelligent," which usually means quietly hoovering up more of your data to feed it back to you as features. The default assumption has flipped. Your thoughts are the product.

I wanted to build the opposite: an AI-assisted journal where the intelligence works for you, but the data stays with you.

It's slower to build. It's more expensive to engineer. It means I'll lose people who forget their passphrases and feel betrayed. I've made peace with all of that.

Because if your inner life is worth writing down, it's worth not handing over.

Who This Is Really For

I made it for the people who are carrying things they don't talk about. The ones who've trained themselves not to. Who keep it together at work, keep it together at home, keep it together in front of the people they love, and then lie awake with all of it pressing on their chest.

I made it for the version of me who didn't yet know that writing things down could help. And for the people I lost, who maybe never found a way to put what they were carrying somewhere safe.

If that's you, if you've been holding something with nowhere to put it, I hope this gives you somewhere to start.