From the author, Rafael J. Hernández

When the doctor told me I had cancer, I laughed.

I was 23. I had just moved to Savannah for my dream school, one quarter into a master's program I had chased for years, and I was weeks from flying home to Venezuela for the first time in eleven years. Cancer was not on the schedule. So when the word came, my first reaction was almost funny in how certain it was. That's not me.

He hadn't been kidding. I asked him if I could still go to Venezuela. He said he would not recommend that at all, that I needed a biopsy and tests as soon as possible. It was Ewing’s sarcoma, a bone cancer that typically affects children. In an adult it is rare. My doctor put my odds at one in a million. He did not mean it as comfort.

What followed was a year. Sixteen rounds of chemotherapy and surgery to remove the affected bone. Early on, within weeks of the diagnosis, the biopsy and scans came back with no sign it had spread. The words "no metastasis" are ones I will never take for granted.

What cancer postponed, it did not get to erase. The trip I lost that November of 2006 I finally took in January 2008. A month at home, still recovering, alive.

The harder part came after, once the scans were clean and I was supposed to simply be fine. Making sense of what had happened took me years, and therapy was the trigger that let the real work begin. It broke me down and rebuilt me around different values. It made me more empathetic. It taught me to feel how precious it is to be alive in a way I never had before, and I mean that every single birthday, which I still celebrate like it counts, because it does.

It also made me a member of a club. Anyone who has faced cancer knows the one I mean. You lose people you were sure would stay. You gain people who understand you with no backstory required, who skip past the small talk to the things that are real. It is the best club you never want to be a part of, and that contradiction is the title of this book.

Here is what I most want a kid to know, and what took me longest to learn. Your feelings are allowed. All of them. Fear, anger, sadness, the wish to be brave on a day you do not feel brave. None of them make you weak. Each one has a job. Together with your gut and your mind they become a kind of compass, the thing that tells you who you are and where to go. Letting yourself feel what you feel is where the bravery starts.

I almost never wrote this. I am a designer, and a book was never supposed to be my job, so I had a long list of reasons to leave it unwritten. My fiancée Monse would not let those reasons stand. She kept asking me one question, why not, and kept encouraging me until I stopped putting it off. I might have gotten here on my own eventually. She is the reason I got here now. The illustrations come from my cousin Josy. We grew up together in Maracaibo, then life scattered us, me to the United States and her to Colombia. Making this book has been a family reunion drawn one page at a time.

The boy in the story is named Joshy. It comes from my own middle name, Josué, which is Joshua in English. I made him small and funny and easy to love on purpose, because the easier he is to love, the more it matters when he is scared, and the more it means when he finds his way through. He is the kid I was speaking to, a little bit of me and maybe a little bit of all of us, because some part of us is always still that small, trying our hardest and quietly wondering if we are enough.

We are. That is the whole book, really. It ends on the line I still cannot say out loud without stopping. You're braver and stronger than you ever knew.

Rafael J. Hernández joined the club this book is named for at 23, when he was diagnosed with Ewing’s sarcoma, a bone cancer that typically affects children and teens. After a year of chemotherapy and surgery, the scans came back clean. Since 2010 he has mentored people facing a similar diagnosis. Born in Venezuela and raised in Maracaibo, he is a product designer by trade, and this is his first book. He lives in Miami Beach with Monse and their goldendoodles, Archie and Coco, and still celebrates every birthday like it counts, because it truly does.

Josymar Arteaga is a Venezuelan illustrator with more than 15 years of experience in traditional and digital art. Her work draws on nature, botany and the emotional world, combining techniques such as watercolor and gouache to create sensitive, expressive visual worlds. Alongside illustrating books, she leads community art workshops and gatherings.