After Getting Out of Depression, I Built a Tool Just for Myself

I had severe depression and bipolar disorder.

From primary school into adulthood, because of things at home, I was the withdrawn kid, the isolated one, the one with no confidence.

The light only started coming in after I finished college.

After graduation I moved into software product design, and for the first time I felt the pleasure of solving something with logic and design together. But one question stayed with me the whole time. What is a person actually living for.

More than ten years without daylight. I stood at that edge more times than I can count.

I had done plenty of therapy and counseling. Almost none of it worked on me.

Later I got into divination. I asked astrologers, BaZi readers, Zi Wei readers. Not one of them could answer that question.

Curiosity pushed me to go learn astrology myself. I learned it while using it, and somewhere along the way I became an astrology counselor.

The deeper I went, the more I understood where my own depression came from. I made peace with a childhood that was poor and miserable.

I am not here to sell you astrology. What actually helped me was that it gave me somewhere to stand, an angle from which I could look at myself from the outside. The North Node is what that means to me.

Later I used astrology and psychology together to help people around me, and it worked better than I expected. Give a person somewhere to stand, and they can move their own life.

I met a 13-year-old girl. Her parents had worked far from home for years, she had been left behind with relatives, and she had stopped going to school.

I wanted to help her. I grew up the same way.

I did not take the case. Pulling someone out of that takes an enormous amount of time and energy. I was buried in work, I had my own bills, and I could not do it.

That one stayed with me. Most kids like her cannot afford a counselor, and cannot bring themselves to open up to a real person anyway.

Those were the years ChatGPT and Claude arrived. I found that with careful tuning, an AI could work as a junior to intermediate astrology counselor, with both counseling and astrology skills. Everything I had learned in software design finally had somewhere to go.

In 2024 I met CC, who was building AI tarot, through social media. In 2025 I joined the team and spent a full year tuning an AI into a counselor that was cheap enough, patient enough to stay for the long run, and free of personal bias.

We shipped it.

But after watching closely for a year how people and that AI counselor treated each other, I saw something else.

A beautiful imagined future gives the brain its dopamine. But if nothing lands, if nothing moves forward, you end up carrying water in a basket. The emptiness after that hurts more than before.

So it has to land somewhere.

Counseling is not the answer, and it is not the destination. When someone stays lost long enough, counseling can turn into another drug. The kind you slowly get hooked on.

I went through a lot of research on psychological treatment. Art therapy and expressive writing have a clear effect on depression and on feeling lost. Writing and drawing with your hands pull you out of the loop your thoughts keep spinning in, and put you back into your body.

In plain words, making things helps with pain, and it does real work for rebuilding a sense of self.

Across all those consultations I saw something else. A lot of people stay with someone they do not like, doing work they do not like, lost and hurting for years, and underneath it they do not know who they actually are. What they want, what they cannot stand, what they are good at, what they value. None of it is clear to them.

That kind of knowing does not arrive in a flash one afternoon. It takes rounds of shaping, finding, tearing down, and testing again.

And when it comes to making something, I cannot think of anything more compelling than a book that belongs only to you.

It makes your life visible. And years from now you open it and find that along the way there were so many moments that mattered. Good ones, ones you grew from, ones that hurt.

What you actually lived through is the most valuable fruit on the tree of your life.

By 2026 I could not sit on it anymore.

I wanted to build a product that was genuinely for the person using it. No retention games, no hooks. One job. Help someone know themselves, and keep it.

That is where Yujee came from. In Chinese it means meeting yourself, and also steering yourself.

The way it works is concrete. It turns your scattered photos and words into a book you can open. And in the act of choosing and arranging your own life, you see who you are again.

What Yujee does today:

• Sorts your photos automatically and groups the similar ones
• Lays out the book for you, no dragging things around
• Helps you write, turning fragments into a story that holds together
• Shares in one click, so the people who matter can read it

Yujee was built entirely by me working with Claude Code, learning and shipping at the same time. The systems architecture I picked up years ago doing system integration still holds up. Ask me again later.

For two months I barely slept, and put out the first demo I considered usable. In July, 20 early users sent feedback, and I kept going.

Doing the whole thing alone is not easy. But I wanted to get this one thing right, badly.

What Yujee is today is still a very small version. It may not change anything for you right away. I still want to put this stubbornness into it.