Today, my first book, The Gabby Effect, is officially out in the world.
That sentence feels both surreal and strangely quiet after everything it took to get here.
Because this book didn’t start as a “book idea.” It started as tension. As questions I didn’t have answers to. As moments that didn’t make sense while I was living them.
It’s a story of disapproval, storms, and the quiet ache of not quite belonging.
It’s about navigating expectations—some spoken, most silently imposed—and slowly realizing how easy it is to lose your voice when you spend too long trying to live up to them.
It’s also about what it takes to get that voice back.
At the center of it all is our adoption journey.
April 8, 2026, marks four years since Gabby legally became ours. Four years since everything shifted. Not all at once, not in some cinematic, neatly wrapped moment—but slowly, imperfectly, and in ways I’m still learning to understand.
If there’s one truth this story keeps circling back to, it’s this:
Home isn’t a place. It’s a person.
And sometimes, it takes walking through uncertainty, disappointment, and more than a few storms to actually believe that.
This book holds a lot.
The hard conversations.
The moments of doubt.
The quiet, ordinary days that didn’t feel significant at the time, but ended up changing everything.
It also holds humor, because if you don’t learn to laugh somewhere along the way, the weight of it all gets unbearable.
And it holds faith—not the polished, easy kind, but the kind that gets tested, stretched, and rebuilt over time.
A sense of home, I’ve learned, isn’t a destination. Healing doesn’t arrive all at once. Neither does hope.
These are built slowly. Through perseverance. Through love. By choosing to keep going when it would be easier not to.
That’s what I poured into these pages.
Not perfection. Not answers to everything. Just honesty.
Wherever you find yourself in The Gabby Effect, my hope isn’t just that you understand my story.
It’s that somewhere in it, you recognize your own.
And if you’re here reading this—whether you’ve followed my writing for years or just stumbled into this space today—thank you!
This part of the journey exists because of you. 💟
I’m so happy for your release day and proud of you for sharing your family’s story!