About Coji Universe

For most of my life I was chaotic rather than slow. Always moving, always starting things, always saying yes, and somehow always getting it done. I could hyperfocus for twelve hours and come out with something good and a body that had forgotten to eat.

From the outside I looked like I was managing, and I was. What nobody saw was the cost: the days of recovery afterwards, and the wall I never noticed building until I walked into it.

Then I got COVID. And then I didn’t really get better.

Long COVID is a strange illness. Some days I felt almost normal. Other days I couldn’t walk to the kitchen without needing to lie down. The fatigue wasn’t like being tired. It was a full-body shutdown. My brain stopped working the way it used to. I’d lose words mid-sentence. I’d forget things immediately after being told them. I’d try to do a simple task and just... stall. Nothing would start.

The medical system didn’t really know what to do with me. I was bounced around. Told to rest. Told to pace myself. But nobody gave me tools. Nobody explained how to actually live inside a body that had become unpredictable.

I started tracking everything: energy levels, symptoms, sleep, what I managed to do and what I couldn’t. Not because I was organised, but because I was desperate to find patterns. To understand what was happening to me.

The concept of battery levels, of knowing exactly what you have to work with that day, started forming in my head. Not as an app idea. Just as a survival tool.

At university, I got a diagnosis: dyspraxia. I didn’t really know what that meant.

It was mentioned almost in passing. A note in my file. I looked it up briefly, saw something about coordination and motor skills, and filed it away without a second thought. I was clumsy, sure. I bumped into things. My handwriting was a mess. Okay, so that’s what that is. And I moved on.

I had never, at any point, thought I might have ADHD. I knew the stereotype: the hyperactive little boy who couldn’t sit still in class. I was someone who got things done. I just assumed I wasn’t the type.

So I kept going. Like I always do. The diagnosis didn’t change anything, because I didn’t yet understand what it was actually telling me.

Long COVID forced me to slow down enough to actually look. And when I looked, I started reading about dyspraxia properly.

Dyspraxia is so much more than coordination. It affects how the brain processes information. It affects spelling and numeracy, things I’d struggled with for years and put down to not concentrating hard enough. It affects working memory, sensory processing, spatial reasoning, fatigue, and the cognitive overhead of everyday physical tasks that other people seem to do without thinking.

I had been spending enormous amounts of energy on things I didn’t even know I was spending energy on. Every day. For my entire life. Finally understanding that didn’t just explain things, it changed how I treated myself. I stopped pushing through. I started factoring in recovery time.

I was a social worker in disabilities. I qualified in 2020 and spent three years in statutory practice, in SEND, safeguarding and transitions.

What I saw, over and over, was families asked to run a system that assumed a capacity nobody in the room had. Fill in this form. Attend this review. Repeat your child’s entire history to a new social worker because the last one moved teams. So why does support so often arrive shaped like the service rather than shaped like the person? A family with a disabled child has a fluctuating week. The statutory calendar does not fluctuate, so the family is the one expected to bend.

Here is the part I did not see coming. I was writing plans that accounted for other people’s processing speed, sensory needs and fatigue, and I had no working understanding of my own. I would come home from arguing for a child’s access arrangements and lose an hour to a form I could not make myself start.

I left frontline practice in 2024. The social work did not leave. Every part of Coji that asks about your energy before it asks about your tasks comes from three years of watching what happens when support arrives at the wrong moment, in the wrong size, for someone already at the edge of what they have.

So Coji treats the battery as a real input rather than a metaphor, sorts what is in front of you by the energy you have as well as by urgency, and reads a difficult week as information. It is for the late-diagnosed adults rebuilding a sense of themselves, the long COVID community working around unpredictable capacity, autistic people managing sensory load, and anyone whose assessment is still years down a waiting list.

I am still learning, mostly new language for things I have always experienced and could never name. That process does not stop, and neither does Coji.