Reentry: I came home with nothing. The app gave me something.

When you come home, everyone tells you about the resources. Most of them aren't real. The ones that are real have a six-month waitlist. I had been out for two weeks, sleeping on my cousin's couch, and the inside of my head was the loudest place I'd ever lived.

My case manager mentioned this app. I figured it was going to be like all the rest — well-intended, ten clicks deep, then nothing. It wasn't.

The peer support match they made for me was a guy named James, who had done eight years and come home in 2019. He had walked the exact same path I was walking. We talked twice a week, sometimes more. Some days we just talked about basketball. Some days I cried for forty minutes and he didn't say anything, and that was somehow exactly what I needed.

Six months later I had a job, an apartment, and a therapist I trusted. None of that is the app — that's me. But the app got me from week two to week ten, which is the stretch where most of us go back. It gave me a person who knew the way out, because he had walked it.

I'm not going back.