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Emotional Pokemon: In Shad’s Voidpet App, Users Embrace Emotional Awareness — The Heights

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Linda Shad was living in a “hacker house” near Silicon Valley, Calif. with several other coders when she said she had an intense mental breakdown. She had just graduated from Boston College with a degree in computer science and decided to move across the country and work for a startup. But things were not going according to plan. Shad said she was broke and depressed—she felt hopeless. And then she started to draw. She channeled her emotions into her drawings. She drew her anger and her anxiety as creatures. These drawings soon became the basis of Shad’s first successfully launched app: Voidpet. “It started with me just having a really bad day,” Shad said. Voidpet is an app where users adopt and befriend their emotions. Emotions are depicted as pets, and the user chooses which self-care activities they want to implement in real life to earn points and level up their “voidpets.” Shad launched the app in February of 2023. Since its debut, Voidpet has garnered around 500,000 users, she sa

Linda Shad was living in a “hacker house” near Silicon Valley, Calif. with several other coders when she said she had an intense mental breakdown. She had just graduated from Boston College with a degree in computer science and decided to move across the country and work for a startup. But things were not going according to plan. Shad said she was broke and depressed—she felt hopeless. And then she started to draw. She channeled her emotions into her drawings. She drew her anger and her anxiety as creatures. These drawings soon became the basis of Shad’s first successfully launched app:…

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