I didn’t set out to write a book.

I started with fragments—journal entries, blog posts, sleepless-night thoughts scribbled into the notes app on my phone. I wrote during moments when life felt too loud, too uncertain, or too hollow to ignore. What I didn’t realize at the time was that I wasn’t just writing through stress and trauma—I was writing into it. And eventually, I found myself standing inside something deeper than I had planned to build: a full book called Lemonade Tough.

This project started as survival. A need to process. A way to say the things that no one says out loud when your world quietly collapses and you still have to show up for work, still have to smile at the grocery store, still have to function when everything inside of you is unraveling.

I’ve worked in healthcare for over 30 years, much of it in trauma centers. I’ve seen how pain works. I’ve witnessed the way grief settles into the human body. I’ve seen how people try to hold themselves together after the unthinkable. And I’ve walked through more than one season of my own where the ground disappeared underneath me and I had no idea how to move forward.

Writing this book meant revisiting those seasons. Not from a distance, not as a narrator who had it all figured out, but from inside the rawness. There were days I sat at my desk trying to write a chapter and found myself crying instead. Sometimes the writing felt cathartic. Other times it felt like reopening something I had worked hard to keep closed.

But here’s what I kept coming back to: if I could go there—if I could be brave enough to revisit those moments and write about them honestly—maybe someone else wouldn’t feel so alone when they were in their own wreckage. Maybe they would read a line and recognize themselves in it. Maybe they would feel seen.

That became the fuel behind every chapter.

I didn’t want to write a book that gave advice from a pedestal. I didn’t want to offer ten steps to healing or claim to have a formula for resilience. Because that’s not how pain works. That’s not how recovery works. Most days, it’s not even linear. It’s circular. It’s layered. It’s one good morning followed by one hard afternoon. It’s learning how to breathe again while still feeling like you’re underwater.

Lemonade Tough was written for those in-between moments. For the person who is still standing, but barely. For the one who is tired of pretending they’re okay. For the ones who feel like they’re “too sensitive” or “too emotional” or “too messy” to bounce back the way the world expects them to.

As I wrote, I found myself peeling back layers of my own story—not just the big traumas, but the small ones. The invisible accumulations. The long, slow silences that shaped me in ways I didn’t fully understand until I had to put them into words. Writing the chapter on boundaries meant reckoning with the years I didn’t have any. Writing about nervous system overload brought back the countless nights where I couldn’t sleep, couldn’t think, couldn’t feel steady in my own skin. Writing about joy meant confronting how long I’d been afraid to feel it—afraid it might vanish, afraid I didn’t deserve it.

There’s something sacred about writing from a place of truth. It asks you to stop editing yourself. To stop performing. To let the page witness who you really are underneath the coping. That’s what this book became—a mirror, not just for the reader, but for me.

And it wasn’t always easy. There were moments I wanted to soften the edges. To make the words more polished or palatable. But I knew that wouldn’t serve anyone. If this book was going to mean something, it had to be honest. It had to stay close to the pain, even while reaching for hope.

One of the most unexpected parts of this journey was how writing the book actually deepened my own healing. Putting words to things I’d carried in silence for years gave me language I didn’t know I needed. It helped me see the throughline between experiences that once felt disconnected. It reminded me that resilience isn’t about never falling apart—it’s about learning how to stay with yourself when you do.

And it reminded me that there’s no finish line. Healing is not something you check off a list. It’s something you practice, again and again, often in the smallest ways: a boundary honored, a moment of rest taken without guilt, a truth spoken without apology.

Now that the book is finished, I’m humbled by what it has become. Not because it’s perfect, but because it’s real. It’s the book I wish someone had handed me during one of my own bitter seasons. Not to fix me. Not to give me answers. But to say, “You’re not broken. You’re becoming. And you’re allowed to do that slowly.”

I hope Lemonade Tough feels that way for you.

Whether you’re in the middle of something hard or carrying the echoes of what once was, I hope this book feels like company. I hope it gives you permission to feel what you feel. To rest. To rebuild. To begin again without needing to go back.

This wasn’t easy to write. But I’m grateful I did. And I’m even more grateful you’re here, reading it.

We don’t need to be unbreakable to make it through.

We just need to stay.