This app exists because
reading was hard for me

I was always told I was too distracted

My name is Muujiza. I'm 23, and I grew up in the Democratic Republic of Congo. From as early as I can remember, one of my mom's most common refrains was — "Muujiza, you are too distracted."

My school reports told the same story year after year: good student, but too distracted. I wasn't failing. I wasn't causing trouble. I was just... somewhere else. I could never quite explain it, and neither could anyone around me.

Back home, mental health isn't inspected or discussed the way it is in Western countries. There was no framework for what I was experiencing. No name for it. So I carried it quietly — a vague sense that something about the way my brain worked was just... wrong.

Reading felt like trying to fill a bucket with a hole in it

Reading and studying were where it hit hardest. It wasn't that I couldn't read — I could. But I would go back to the same sentence ten times and still not register what I'd just read. The words would go in, and something between my eyes and my brain, the information just wouldn't stick.

This made everything take longer. Exams, assignments, studying — tasks that felt simple for others felt like running uphill for me. And because I didn't have a word for what was happening, I did what a lot of people do: I assumed I just wasn't capable.

Then a language barrier made
everything even harder

When I moved to the United States, reading got harder before it got better. Now I wasn't just trying to focus — I was also decoding an entirely different language. I'd have to stop mid-sentence to look up a word, and by the time I found it, I'd lost the thread of what I was reading entirely.

The focus it took just to understand the words left almost nothing left over for actually absorbing the meaning behind them. It felt like trying to run two programs on a computer that was already at 100% CPU.

That diagnosis didn't change who I was. But it changed how I understood myself. Suddenly, so many things made sense — the distraction, the re-reading, the overwhelm, the overthinking. It wasn't a character flaw. It was just how my brain was wired.

One video changed everything

One night, scrolling TikTok, I came across a video about a reading technique called Bionic Reading®, which bolds the beginning of each word. I tried it, and something clicked. For the first time in a long time, a page didn't feel like a wall.

But I didn't want to stop at a trend. I dug into the research behind how we actually read: how our eyes jump from point to point, and how dense text overloads the brain. What I learned became WaziSoma, a calm space to read your way, with Ink Mode, Focus mode, and more to come.

Wazi means clear. Soma means read. That's the whole promise: read clearly.

Why WaziSoma?

Swahili is my mother tongue. It was the language of my childhood, my home, my family. When it came to naming this app, it felt right to root it in something personal — not just a generic English word, but something that came from where I came from.

That phrase — you can read — is what I wish someone had told me years ago. Not as a challenge. As a reassurance. Your brain isn't broken. You just needed the right tool.