When I launched my blog, Tom Aplomb, in June 2008, I was bitter. Although I had recently remarried, the wounds from my divorce and dysfunctional first marriage were fresh. After many years of silence, my quiet, reflective, writerly voice wanted to say something, but my angry, aggrieved, and vehement voice demanded to be heard, to catapult like an angry bird and smash my ex, my pain, my past life to pieces. My early posts took the form of rants—how could she?—or laments—how could this have happened to me? I steered clear of self-pity but made pitiful progress on the road to self-awareness and self-understanding. I was a mess, and I wanted the world to know it wasn’t my fault.

Three things happened to change the blog’s trajectory and alter its target.

First, a Twitter acquaintance told me I needed to use my real name if I wished to be taken seriously. I had been hiding behind a nom de plume, Tom Aplomb, concerned that people who knew me would see my story and devour the details of my emotional and psychological undoing. I hadn’t yet watched Brené Brown’s famous TED talk, and I was as much ashamed of my life as I was outraged at its severely damaged state. I also worried that my ex would find the blog or that parents of my young children’s school classmates would, to use a contemporary term, cancel me—and my sons’ playdates. With trepidation, I took ownership of my truth—deciding to let the reactions fall where they may.

Second, the reactions realigned my direction. As readers related to my story and found wisdom in my words, I realized the purpose of my posts was to help others and not just heal myself. By turning my focus outward, I turned the blog from a source of self-soothing to a source of solace for those who had experienced hurt, heartbreak, harmful relationships—the hard truths of the human condition. The impact my writing was having on readers made my daily discipline (publishing each morning on my commute to Manhattan) a daily delight, a delicious weight, a labor of love.

Third, and most momentous, when my second marriage fizzled, I reconnected with my first love, after nearly twenty years of separation. One of her many gifts was my spiritual awakening. She taught me to listen with my heart and look toward heaven for the message I was meant to convey, and my writing took on a poetic quality and sacred aspect that often astonished me—and still does.

As my posts piled up, I made many attempts to organize, categorize, and synthesize them into a book. But no framework seemed to make sense. Only when I came up with the idea for this volume—a testament to the letters of love from a lover of letters—did I realize I had been writing about love all along. And then everything made sense. So here it is, The Alphabet of Love.