My name is [Name]. I'm a mathematician, a technologist, a choreographer, and a person in recovery. I built Buoy because I couldn't find a tool that worked the way my recovery actually works — non-linear, messy, and deeply mine.
![[Your name] — founder of Buoy](/images/buoy_branding_7.png)
"Recovery is not one thing. It's a story that changes shape over time — and I couldn't find a tool that understood that." — [Name], founder
I've been in recovery for over a decade. I've tried AA, therapy, moderation management, Naltrexone, peer support, and AI chat. Different things have worked at different stages. Building Buoy was my way of making sense of all of it.
My addiction didn't begin with a bad decision. It began with surgery — several of them, consecutive, during my gender transition in my late twenties. Each one left me in real pain. Each one came with a prescription. Somewhere in that year and a half, the pain stopped being the reason I was taking it.
I quit oxycontin cold turkey after recognizing, in one clear moment, how much I'd quietly given away — energy, presence, the texture of my own days. Access helped: you can't refill a prescription at 11pm. What worked for opioids didn't work for alcohol. That lesson took longer to learn.
"Alcohol is hard because it's everywhere. Because a glass of wine is what reasonable adults do at dinner. Because the world is not organized around your sobriety."
If opioids were a sudden flood, alcohol was a slow tide through my thirties. By the time I understood how much of my life was organized around it, the tide was already high. The tools that helped with Oxy didn't help here. What I needed was ongoing management, not a single moment of clarity.
Here is what has been in my toolkit, honestly and without hierarchy:
I want to be clear about what AI is and isn't. It's not therapy. There's no real relationship. In an acute crisis, you need a human being.
But addiction isn't only made of acute crises. A lot of it is the low-grade hum of an urge on a Tuesday night — the moment you're driving home and can already see the liquor store. In those moments, what you sometimes need is just a place to say the thing out loud and have something reflect it back, without the weight of another person's worry.
Shame is one of the engines of addiction, and it also makes asking for help hard. Calling someone I love when I'm struggling requires trust, and trust is difficult when I'm ashamed. An AI doesn't require that trust first. That lower barrier means I reach for help sooner — and sooner is what matters.
I started using AI chat in my recovery before I thought about building one. I noticed it was helping. I also noticed it wasn't quite right — not built for this, not aware of my patterns or history. I started thinking about what it would look like if it were.
I have a PhD in mathematics, a career in tech, a parallel life as a professional choreographer and dancer, and a community of people I love. By most measures, I was high-functioning. Which meant I also had particular blindspots — it's easy to tell yourself you're fine when you're still performing fine.
I quit because I kept getting glimpses of what my life felt like when I was fully inside it. Not fighting for energy, not negotiating with my own brain, not spending a portion of every day somewhere else. I wanted to live in those glimpses.
"The most useful thing a person who built a recovery app can say is not 'I figured it out' — it's 'I'm still figuring it out, and here's what I've learned so far.'"
I'm still in it. Alcohol is still harder than opioids were. I still have weeks that are easier than others. Buoy is built on the belief that this is not a failure — it's just what recovery looks like for a lot of people. Not a solution. A companion for the figuring.
Abstinence, moderation, harm reduction, MAT — Buoy supports them all without a preferred outcome.
The app will never shame you for a relapse, a slip, or a choice it doesn't fully understand.
The hardest moments don't wait for business hours. Neither does Buoy.
What you share in Buoy belongs to you. It's not sold, mined for ads, or used to train AI.
Buoy is not a therapist or a sponsor. We say this clearly because we mean it.
Your approach will change. Buoy is built to hold that history — not flatten it into a single label.
You don't have to be at rock bottom. You don't have to know what kind of recovery you're doing. You just have to want a little more support than you currently have — on your terms, at your pace.
Download Buoy