Content note: this piece discusses trauma, suicide, substance use, and recovery.
I want to start by telling you something I've rarely said out loud: for most of my life, I didn't think I'd make it this far.
That's not a dramatic opener. It's just the truth. And if Kinri is going to mean anything, it has to start with the truth.
Where It Begins
My story starts early - earlier than most people's do, in the ways that matter.
My parents were never able to be the teachers and guides a child needs. School became a battleground almost immediately. I struggled to understand other people's behaviour. I was emotionally overwhelmed constantly. I acted in ways that confused and frustrated the people around me, and I couldn't explain why, because I didn't know why.
There were moments of real wonder. I loved maths, science, history - felt genuinely alive inside ideas. But academic success kept slipping away, and the gap between what I felt capable of and what I could actually produce became its own kind of torment.
I was misdiagnosed with school phobia and expelled at twelve, after being caught smoking cannabis. My family moved sixteen times between my birth and the day I left home at thirteen - largely because of my father's erratic and often violent behaviour. We went to South Africa and back twice. There was never a sense of safety. Never a sense of ground beneath my feet.
My father was physically and mentally violent, regularly. He drank our family's money away. I witnessed things in that house that no child should witness. My mother, for all her own pain, simply didn't have the resources to protect us. I've had to make peace with cutting my father out of my life entirely. I hold compassion for people who seek to improve themselves. He was not one of those people.
At thirteen, I left. Sofa-surfed. Found work where I could. At fourteen, back in South Africa for a third time, I encountered a predatory adult who took advantage of my vulnerability in ways no child should ever have to endure. It was my first real lesson in how cruel some people can be toward a child who has no one protecting them.
Years of Searching
Back in the UK by fifteen or sixteen, I tried college. There was no other option presented to me - the expectation was simply to be normal and get on with it. I bounced between low-skilled jobs, constantly trying to patch something I didn't yet have language for.
I sought help, many times. Doctors, psychiatrists, medications that left me numb, hollow, and disconnected from myself. Group therapy with people whose experiences felt entirely foreign to mine. Misdiagnosis after misdiagnosis. Nothing I was offered reached the underlying problem, and very little brought lasting relief.
So I tried everything else. Exercise. Fad diets. Alcohol. Drugs. Compulsive behaviours of all kinds, eventually to the point of permanent physical damage. I used to think I had an addictive personality. I know now that I was traumatised, and my mind and body were doing anything they could to produce even a temporary sense of relief.
Relationships were painful. People carrying unresolved pain often find one another, and my early relationships were shaped by that. I went through periods of real crisis - moments where I tried to end my life, and others where I turned that pain onto myself in different ways. Not all of those moments meant the same thing. Some were a cry for help. Others were not.
At thirty, after all of that searching, I finally received an accurate diagnosis: Borderline Personality Disorder - specifically Emotionally Unstable Personality Disorder. It explained so much. But a label without the right support is just a name for the thing that's still breaking you.
Then I suffered a catastrophic leg injury, with twenty-three fractures, multiple surgeries, and months in hospital. And then six years, largely confined to one room, sustained by increasingly strong opiates.
It was the worst period of my life.
It was also, somehow, a rare kind of opportunity.
The Room
I had six years to read. To research. To sit with mental health literature, neuroscience, nutrition, psychology - things I'd never had the stillness to engage with properly before. I learned more about my own mind in that room than in all the clinical appointments I'd attended in the previous two decades combined.
I held on. Even in the periods where I'd largely resigned myself to just waiting for a natural end, and there were those periods, something in me kept holding on.
The Turning Point
A few years ago, my brother took his own life.
I nearly followed him. What stopped me wasn't strength, exactly. It was watching what that loss did to the people around him. I couldn't do that to them. That was enough - not a coward's reason, but a real one. Still, I had largely given up on a meaningful life. I was waiting.
Then came DMT.
I don't say this lightly, and I'm not presenting it as a prescription for anyone else. But for me, it was a profound shift unlike anything I had encountered before. In the middle of that experience, I found myself in tears, held by something that felt, impossibly, like unconditional love. Something telling me it wasn't my fault. That I didn't choose to be born into what I was born into. That I was allowed to forgive myself.
I wasn't suddenly cured. But after thirty-nine years of growing hopelessness, I no longer wanted to give up. That shift was everything.
Over the months that followed, I continued exploring psychedelics cautiously within my own recovery, alongside intensive self-directed learning and major changes to how I lived. Ketamine slowed my racing mind enough to actually reflect without being overwhelmed. Psychedelics brought buried traumas to the surface where I could look at them properly. And all the research from those six years in that room finally had somewhere to land.
I started to see clearly, perhaps for the first time. Not because I had become someone different, but because I finally understood who I actually was.
The behaviours I had hated myself for weren't evidence of being a bad person. They were the predictable output of a nervous system shaped by years of trauma, without ever being given the right tools.
What Changed
Understanding the why was the key that unlocked everything else.
Trauma creates pathways in the brain. When reinforced over years, those pathways become habits, and those habits can make a person appear broken, or difficult, or even unkind. But that is not the truth of who they are.
Once I could see my patterns clearly, not with shame, but with genuine curiosity, I could begin to work with them rather than against them. I started prioritising sleep, whole foods, basic routine. Things that sound almost embarrassingly simple. Things that had been impossible to sustain for most of my life.
I set boundaries. I learned to think before reacting. I stopped drinking to excess. My memory improved. My relationships began to heal.
I am not cured. BPD doesn't work like that, and I wouldn't claim otherwise. But I am managing myself - with real tools, real understanding, and real agency over my own life. For the first time, I feel like the author of my own story. For most of my life, that felt completely out of reach.
Why I’m Building Kinri
Everything I went through taught me something no clinician ever told me directly:
What people like me need, before assessment, medication, or another generic pathway, is to be seen.
Assessment and treatment can matter enormously. But without understanding the person in front of you, even the right tools can miss the mark.
We need language for our experience. We need frameworks that actually fit how our minds work. We need something that meets us where we are without rushing us toward answers we're not ready for, and without making us feel like the problem.
That thing didn't exist when I needed it.
So I started building it.
Kinri is still taking shape. We're currently in beta, learning and refining as we go. But every part of it - Echo, the self-insight questionnaire, the reflection tools - comes from lived experience. Not from a clinical manual. Not from a VC pitch. From thirty-nine years of searching for something that finally makes sense.
No matter how lost, stuck, or exhausted you feel, meaningful change is possible. What's needed is a plan - the kind many people struggle to access through overstretched systems.
I'm here because I finally found mine. And I'm building Kinri so you might find yours sooner.
- Asa