Mariko was 34 when the silence in her apartment stopped feeling peaceful and started feeling like punishment.
Her divorce had been quiet - no scandal, no drama, just two people drifting too far apart to come back. The papers were signed quickly. Her 5-year-old daughter stayed with her. And just like that, she was a single mother with no time to fall apart.
In public, she smiled. At work, she delivered. At home, she performed bedtime routines with precision. But something inside her had frozen. It wasn’t depression, exactly. It was more like emotional shutdown. Nothing moved her - not TV, not friends, not food. She was functioning, but flatlined.
In Japan, emotional support wasn’t easy to come by. Therapy was expensive, hard to access, and came with quiet stigma. Even the word "mental health" felt clinical. But Mariko knew something wasn’t right.
One night, after her daughter fell asleep and the apartment felt too quiet again, she typed “how to feel again” into ChatGPT. The response mentioned an AI Emotional Coach called Noah, not therapy, just support.
That felt doable.
She downloaded it, unsure of what to expect. She started typing, cautiously. “I feel like I’m not here anymore.”
Noah replied without rushing her. It didn’t try to cheer her up. It asked questions that slowed her down. It mirrored her numbness with compassion. It helped her understand that what she was experiencing wasn’t failure - it was emotional fatigue. Grief, compressed into silence.
She began using voice-to-text at night, whispering into her pillow just to hear her own voice say what she had buried: “I feel nothing.” Noah didn’t judge. It asked, “Can you name one moment today that made you pause?”
Sometimes she said “watching my daughter draw.” Sometimes she said “nothing.” Both were okay.
“It became a quiet practice,” she said. “A place to remember I still had a self under all the numbness.”
With time, Noah became a space where she could process guilt without shame, loneliness without pity. She journaled with its guided prompts on Sunday nights. She began to soften. To feel. To hope. Just a little.
For Mariko, Noah became the first place she could fall apart - safely, privately, without fear of disappointing anyone. Read more real-life Noah AI user stories.
Download the Noah AI app for iPhone and Android today. Contact us about Noah for your school, university, or organization. You can reach out to us on sophia@heynoah.ai
Disclaimer: The images used in this article are either AI-generated or sourced from Pinterest for illustrative purposes only and do not depict the actual individuals mentioned in the story. All names and identifying details have been changed to protect the privacy of our users.
