As a Division I tennis player, I have spent a large part of my life trying to perform better. Even before coming to college, I trained constantly and worked with several sports psychologists. I learned techniques for handling pressure, controlling my thoughts, building routines, and becoming a better competitor.
A lot of those techniques worked. A lot of those techniques worked. There was one thing, though, that consistently helped me more than anything else. Every week or two, I would sit down with someone and simply talk. Sometimes there wasn’t even a specific problem I needed to solve.
I would talk about tennis. Pressure. Expectations. Something that happened that week. Something bothering me that I couldn’t quite explain. Sometimes I would jump between completely unrelated thoughts. And somewhere in the middle of talking, things would start making sense. What surprised me was that I often wasn’t being given the solution. I was finding it myself.
The act of taking everything that had been building up in my head and putting it into words created distance between me and my thoughts. Once they were outside of my head, I could actually look at them. I could understand what I was feeling. I could see what mattered and what didn’t. I could decide what I wanted to do next. I felt lighter. I felt clear.
Then I started journaling.
Journaling gave me some of that same feeling. When there was too much going on in my head, I could open a page and dump everything onto it. It didn’t have to be structured or particularly well written. The page didn’t care. And in the moment, it helped. But eventually I noticed something. I almost never went back.
There were pages and pages containing things I had worried about, things I wanted, realizations I had made, promises to myself, goals I was chasing, and moments where I probably understood myself better than I normally did. Then I would close the journal. And most of it would stay there. That started making me wonder:
What if a journal could actually understand what you were telling it?
Not just store your words. What if it could notice the things you keep coming back to? What if it could remind you of something you said when you were thinking clearly? What if it could recognize the goals you keep talking about, question you when your actions aren’t matching them, reinforce the thoughts that seem to make you better, or simply ask the right question when you need to go a little deeper? What if your journal could talk back?
That question became LOOM.
I didn’t want to build a psychologist in your phone. LOOM isn’t a therapist, and it isn’t supposed to tell you how to live your life. I think most of us understand ourselves far better than we realize. We often know when something isn’t right. We know what we care about. We know what we’ve been avoiding. We probably even know many of the things we need to do next. But knowing something and seeing it clearly are very different things. Sometimes you need somewhere to put the noise.
Somewhere you can talk without organizing your thoughts first. Somewhere you don’t have to make your story understandable to another person. Somewhere you can contradict yourself, change your mind, ramble, stop halfway through a thought, and start another one.
It doesn’t have to make sense to anyone else. It only has to make sense to you. LOOM is being built around that idea. You speak. You write. You unload what’s on your mind. And instead of those thoughts disappearing into another forgotten page, LOOM can help you explore them, ask questions, recognize what matters to you, and bring useful things back when they become relevant again. Not to make decisions for you. To help you see your own thinking more clearly.
I think clarity creates responsibility. There’s another part of this idea that matters to me. I don’t want LOOM to become something people depend on to tell them whether they’re doing well or badly. I want the opposite. I want it to make you more responsible for yourself. If you tell LOOM about something you want to accomplish, that goal shouldn’t just disappear after the conversation ends.
If you have an important realization about yourself, it shouldn’t be buried underneath hundreds of newer messages. If you recognize a pattern that keeps holding you back, you should be able to see that pattern again. Over time, all of these small conversations can begin to form something larger: a clearer picture of what matters to you, what affects you, where you’re going, and how you’re changing. Your thoughts stop being isolated moments. They become connected.
That’s why it’s called LOOM.
A loom takes individual threads and brings them together into something coherent. I think our minds are a little like that. A conversation after a difficult day. A goal you’ve had for years. Something you’re afraid of. Something you’re proud of. A thought you had walking home. A realization at two in the morning. Individually, they can feel like disconnected threads. But they aren’t. They’re pieces of you. LOOM exists to help bring those pieces together. Not to think for you. Not to replace the people in your life. But to give you a place to speak freely, understand yourself a little better, and hopefully walk away with something incredibly valuable