When I hit publish on Tyler Never Cried, I thought I’d already lived every emotion that book could drag out of me. Grief, pride, exhaustion, relief,  they all had their turn. But nothing, absolutely nothing, compared to seeing that first review.

It was just a few sentences. But in them, I saw twenty years of my life reflected back at me… the waiting rooms, the therapies, the doubt, the strength I didn’t know I had. One person out there read our story and felt loved by it. They felt seen. And somehow, that made everything real in a way I didn’t expect.

Because Tyler Never Cried isn’t just a book. It’s our life, my heart cracked open and stitched together in chapters. It’s the story of how my family learned to turn pain into purpose and how we kept showing up for each other even when the world didn’t understand us.

And I couldn’t have written a word of it without them. My family carried me through the nights when I stared at a blinking cursor and wondered if anyone would care. They gave me the grace to tell our story honestly  not the polished version, but the one that lived in the trenches of everyday life. The one that hurt, healed, and kept moving forward anyway.

That first review wasn’t validation, it was connection. Proof that vulnerability matters. That someone out there needed to read what I was terrified to say out loud.

To my readers~thank you for taking this journey with me.

To my family~thank you for letting me share ours.

And to every writer holding a story that feels too heavy to tell: write it anyway. Someone is waiting to see themselves in your words.

If you’ve read Tyler Never Cried, I would love to know what it meant to you. Reviews help other readers find the book, but more than that, they remind me why I wrote it in the first place.

One story. One reader. One connection at a time. That’s where the magic really begins.