On March 23, 2026, I met up with some friends at Starbucks in my old neighborhood on the north side of Chicago. It was launch day for my book, The Luck We Carry, a memoir told in essays about my late husband Ken and our journey together through his cancer, and mine alone after he died. I wanted—needed—to put some goodness out into the world. Though the topic is heavy, I wrote with the idea that it could help someone navigating grief, learning from my lessons. This date was extra special because it marked the 25th anniversary of Ken and me meeting.

Eight days later, I didn’t have a job.

Let me back up.

For four years, I worked in corporate communications at Oracle. I wrote things for a living—internal communications, content, copy—which meant I got to spend my days doing the thing I loved while quietly telling myself the thing I really loved was waiting for me after work, in a Ulysses project called TLWC.

The book had been with me for a long time. Ten years in one form or another. This version—the real version, the one that finally said what I actually meant—for the last two. It was about Ken. About loving him and losing him and figuring out how to carry that. About the stories we inherit from the people we love and can’t stop telling even after they’re gone.

I wrote it early in the mornings. I wrote it on weekends. I wrote it in the margins of a life that was otherwise pretty full. My teammates knew about the book. They knew how important it was to me—how it eclipsed my corporate work in ways great and small. They knew about Ken and had a vague idea of what we’d endured together. That kind of openness matters to me. It’s how I know I’m somewhere worth being.

The layoff came on March 31.

I’ve written about the mechanics of that morning elsewhere—the spam folder, the text from my boss in the UK, the anonymous email from “Oracle Leadership.” What I haven’t written about is what the days immediately after felt like.

This immense change didn’t feel that different in practice. As someone who worked from home, I was home. And though I wasn’t working on Oracle work, I was sitting at my desk working on my own projects, getting up to grab a bite or walk Hudson with impunity. There were no meetings to consider. There was no one else to consider. There is an overwhelm that comes from such a wildly sudden change. Even though my base emotion was relief, there were big questions I had to find answers to: what would I do next to fill my soul, and what would I do next to pay my bills.

Would they be the same thing?

My debut memoir was released 8 days ago. I have an author event scheduled a month out. I had a launch team, a newsletter, a Substack, and a list of things I was supposed to be doing to make sure the book found its readers.

And I also had a resume that needed updating.

Those two things do not naturally coexist.

Back to launch day. It arrived the way big days usually do—I was back in my old neighborhood with friends who knew Ken and me. I’d planned it to be low-key and somewhat reverential to the places that once meant so much to me: the apartment where I lived when I met Ken, the apartment we shared until his death, the bar where it all began. It all felt so familiar and so loving. The day went exactly as I hoped.

I’d shepherded the book out of my head and into something tangible. It existed in the world. Someone I’d never met was reading about Ken. About us. About the years we had and the years we didn’t. That part felt exactly the way I thought it would.

I’m writing this article three-and-a-half weeks out from launch day. The book is doing well. Sales are consistent, and the reviews have remained five-star. The job search is ongoing. The calendar is still emptier than I’m used to, but I’m not sure that’s a bad thing.

But here’s the thing about writing a book about loss: it teaches you, slowly and against your will, that the in-between is not a waiting room. It’s not the part you endure until the real part starts. It is the real part.

I’m still in the in-between. I’m starting to think that might be okay.

What are you in the middle of right now that you keep telling yourself is just the in-between?

I found out on the morning of March 31, at the same time as 30,000 of my fellow Oracle colleagues.

I’d gone to the gym in the morning. It was my last day of PTO. I’d taken the previous week off and the first two days of the next week off to work on the launch of my memoir, The Luck We Carry: Love, Loss, and the Stories that Shape Us. It’s a memoir I’d been working on generally for ten years, but more specifically, this version for the last two. It holds the stories of my life around meeting, falling in love with my husband Ken, and then losing him to cancer after ten years together. Each essay has an author’s note with my reflections on that time in my life. I’m incredibly proud of it because I’ve wanted to be a published author since I was 13.

When I pulled into the garage that morning, I grabbed my gym bag and my phone to get out of the car. But for some reason, I scrolled through messages before I did and found a notification in the “spam” folder—something I do once in a while since this feature was added in the last iOS update. I opened up the unknown message to read:

I’m sorry to have to do this while you’re on PTO, but I’m afraid I have to ask you to check your Oracle emails as a matter of urgency.

It was from my boss. I knew she wasn’t texting me from the UK to tell me I got a raise. (I have no hard feelings. She is a lovely human being.)

Something I’ve learned from years of writing personal essays and journaling: we are always—whether we realize it or not—in the middle of a story we’re telling about ourselves. Not a lie, exactly. More like an ongoing narration. A way of making sense of where we’ve been and where we think we’re headed.

My story, for a long time, was a professional one. I was a communicator. A writer. Someone who worked at a large company, did work and was good at it. That identity had weight to it. It had a title, a salary and a calendar full of meetings that told me, every day, where I was.

As I read the practically anonymous email from “Oracle Leadership” (not from a person who would take on the weighty responsibility of delivering such a message), I felt a swirl of emotions, but the one I recall most vividly was relief. I read the email and texted my boss back, saying I’d read it and had enjoyed getting to know her over the previous 4 years. I was then locked out of the remaining systems I hadn’t already been locked out of. It felt unceremonious. Like a door literally hitting my backside on the way out—though I’d done nothing wrong. None of us had.

What nobody tells you about a layoff—at least nobody told me—is that it’s not just a job you lose. It’s a narrative.

The work itself, sure. The routine, the colleagues, the sense of forward motion. But underneath all of that is something subtler and harder to name: the story you’d constructed around the work. The one that answered the question who are you? when someone asked at a dinner party. The one that gave shape to your days and meaning to your effort.

Lose the job, and you lose the story. And for a while, you’re just standing in the wreckage of the plot, wondering what comes next. I’m not the first person to experience this. I won’t be the last. But I do think I had an unusual resource at hand.

I had a published book.

The Luck We Carry: Love, Loss, and the Stories That Shape Us had been living inside me for years, taking shape in notebooks and drafts in Ulysses—my favorite writing app—and early-morning revision sessions. It’s a collection of personal essays about the moments that define us: grief, love, memory and the strange grace of the ordinary days that follow.

I’d been writing about stories my whole life. About how we use them to survive loss. About how the narratives we inherit from our families—about who we are, what we deserve, what it means to love someone—quietly run in the background of every decision we make, like code we never chose but somehow execute perfectly.

And here I was, living inside the thing I’d been writing about.

There’s a particular kind of clarity that arrives when you’re forced to stop. Not the peaceful kind you read about in mindfulness articles. The uncomfortable kind. The kind that shows up uninvited and starts rudely asking questions you’ve been successfully avoiding.

Why did that job mean so much to you?

What were you actually building there?

If the title goes away, what’s left?

I didn’t have good answers at first. Mostly, I had Hudson, a pot of coffee, and a scheduled author event and book signing that suddenly felt more urgent than it had before. Because I realized, in those first strange days of unemployment, that marketing and sharing the book wasn’t a consolation prize. It was the story I actually wanted to be telling.

Here’s what I’ve learned from writing personal essays, if you do it long enough and honestly enough: the stories we tell ourselves are not fixed. They feel fixed. They feel like facts, like biography, like the permanent record. But they’re not.

They’re drafts.

And drafts can be revised.

The story I’d been telling—*I am my job title, my company, my professional output*—turned out to be a first draft. Useful for a while, true in some ways, but incomplete. The layoff didn’t destroy that story so much as it exposed its limitations.

What I’m doing now—promoting the book, yes, but also this next chapter of whatever my professional life becomes—feels more like a second draft. Messier in some ways. Less certain. But closer to something real.

The Luck We Carry came out on March 23. I’m proud of it, the way you’re proud of something that cost you to make. I’m also still figuring out the rest. The job search is ongoing. The calendar is emptier than I’d like. Some days the uncertainty is energizing, and some days it just feels like uncertainty.

But I keep coming back to something I wrote in an early draft of the book that stuck with me, almost without realizing what I was saying at the time: the stories that shape us are rarely the ones we planned. They’re the ones we were brave enough—or desperate enough—to live through.

I’m still living through this one.

I think that’s okay.

What story have you been telling yourself—and when did you last stop to read it?

So many of you have sent the kindest notes since I shared about my layoff. And I’ve been sitting with all of it — grateful, really — thinking about where this steadiness actually comes from.

It comes from Ken. From walking beside him through something so much harder than a job ending.

From learning, in the middle of real loss, that anger is expensive and love is the better spend.

A layoff is a plot twist, not a finale. There’ll be another chapter. There always is.

If any of this resonates, it’s all in The Luck We Carry — link in bio or linktree below. 💙

Linktree: https://linktr.ee/ronstempkowski

#TheLuckWeCarry #GriefAndHealing #Perspective #MemoirWriter #IndieAuthor

That’s not bravado. That’s something I learned the hard way, living through loss and writing about it.

In The Luck We Carry, I explore how grief and change are really the same thing—and how the tools we use to navigate one can help us survive the other. Job loss, layoffs, endings of all kinds. They all trigger grief. And grief, it turns out, has a shape you can learn.

If you’re in a season of change right now, this book was written for you.

📖 Grab a copy → https://lnkd.in/gq67XuWB

📍 Meet me in person: Barbara’s Bookstore, Lombard IL (Yorktown Mall) — April 25, 2–3 pm

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I’ve been rehearsing this moment in my head for a while now. Not the launch itself—the feeling I thought I’d have when it finally arrived. I imagined something cinematic. Maybe a swelling soundtrack. At minimum, a sense of profound certainty that I’d done something meaningful.

Instead, I woke up this morning, made coffee, and sat with Hudson for a few minutes before my brain fully caught up to the date.

March 23, 2026. Launch day.

And then the other thing hit me.

Twenty-five years ago today, on a cold Chicago night in early 2001, I walked two blocks to a little neighborhood bar and met a man with dark, wavy hair and a smile that could power the city grid. He was sitting alone, writing in a journal with a fountain pen. I slid his paper toward me and pretended to read it. His handwriting was completely indecipherable, but that wasn’t the point.

The point was Ken.

I’ve been a writer my whole life—journalist by training, journaler by obsession. I’ve kept notebooks since I was 13, scrawling on yellow stenography pads with a blue Pilot ballpoint pen like I was filing dispatches from my own interior. Writing has never felt optional for me. It’s just how I process being alive. But this book came from a different place than anything I’d written before. When Ken died, writing stopped being a craft and became something closer to oxygen. I didn’t sit down one day and decide to write a grief memoir. I sat down because I had no other way to hold what was happening to me. The pages filled up with all of it — the love, the loss, the absurd moments, the ones so tender I could barely look at them directly. And somewhere in all of that, a book took shape.

The Luck We Carry: Love, Loss, and the Stories That Shape Us is the result of years of that kind of writing. Essays about Ken — how we met, how we loved, how we navigated his terminal diagnosis with martinis and humor and a soirée we planned together even as he was slipping away. But it’s also essays about after. About the vampire incident (yes, there’s a vampire incident). About baking an apple pie and completely falling apart in the process. About a stranger at a library book sale who, without knowing it, handed me a new way of thinking about luck. It’s about what happens when you stop trying to move on from loss and learn — slowly, clumsily, sometimes hilariously — to move with it.

Here’s what I hope this book does for you: I hope it makes you feel less alone. That’s really it. Not less sad—grief doesn’t work that way, and I wouldn’t insult you by suggesting it does. But less alone inside it. Because here’s what I’ve learned after writing my way through all of this: the stories we carry about love and loss are more universal than we think. The details are different. The people are different. The specific flavor of heartbreak is entirely yours. But the experience of loving someone so much that losing them restructures your entire world? That’s not unique to me. That belongs to all of us.

If you’re in the middle of grief right now, I hope something in these pages finds you. If you’re on the other side of it, I hope this book gives language to what you’ve been through. And if you’re somewhere in between — which, let’s be honest, most of us are — I hope it makes you laugh at least once, because Ken would have absolutely insisted on that.

So here we are. Twenty-five years after a cold night in a neighborhood bar, and the story that began there is out in the world. The Luck We Carry is available now wherever books are sold — you can find all the ordering links at ronstempkowski.com. If you’re a book club, a grief support group, or just a human who likes to read and feel things, there’s also a reading guide available designed to spark real conversation—the kind Ken would have loved.

If you read it and something in it means something to you, I’d genuinely love to hear about it. Find me on Instagram, LinkedIn, or Substack. Tell me which essay got you. Tell me about the person you thought of while reading it. That’s why I wrote it. That’s what makes any of this worth it.

This isn’t the silver anniversary I could have ever imagined, but today, twenty-five years after it all began, Ken’s story is no longer just mine to carry.

And that feels exactly right.

The Luck We Carry: Love, Loss, and the Stories That Shape Us is available at bookstores. (See major retailers here.) Ask your local bookstore and library to order a copy or two!

I was interviewed recently about my upcoming book, The Luck We Carry: Love, Loss, and the Stories That Shape Us. I was a little nervous going in, but I kept talking myself down. What question could the host possibly ask me about the book that I couldn’t answer? I wrote it. That helped. Mostly.

But once the show started, none of that mattered. All I wanted was to be present — to engage with my friend Alan Locher, and talk about one of my favorite subjects: Ken, and the book that grew out of loving and losing him.

When it was over, I felt good. Could I have spoken a little slower? Probably. But it was my first time, so I’m giving myself a pass and moving on. I didn’t really plan to watch it back. I was there. I knew what happened. But the next evening after work, I poured a glass of wine, settled in, and hit play.

And when it began, I burst into tears.

Uncontrollably. Ugly-cry-level tears. The kind that surprised me, even though they probably shouldn’t have. They were tears for Ken, of course. They’re always, on some level, for Ken. But they were also something else entirely — something I hadn’t expected to feel while watching myself talk on a screen.

I was proud.

Not in a look-at-me way. It wasn’t that. It was more like watching someone you love from a distance and thinking, look at what you did. Look at how far you’ve come. Except the person on the screen was me, and that made it stranger and more tender than I know how to explain.

That guy on the screen had been through something crushing. Something that rewired him from the inside out. And yet there he was—not hiding, not shrinking—stepping out into the world, sharing the most personal chapters of his life, in hopes that someone else navigating their own grief might feel a little less alone in it.

That’s the whole reason I wrote this book. Not to process my pain publicly (though, let’s be honest, there’s some of that). Not to be brave (though I’ll take the compliment). But because grief can be an isolating, bewildering place, and if my map helps even one person find their footing, then every vulnerable sentence was worth it.

Watching that interview reminded me why I started writing in the first place—and why I keep going.

So if you’re curious what it looks like when a guy who spent years writing in journals at two in the morning finally decides to say all of it out loud: Alan was kind enough to capture that. I’ll link the interview below.

It was an experience I won’t soon forget, and will hold close to me for a long time.

Subscribe to my newsletter to keep up with the inside scoop. Join by March 23, and you’ll be entered into a chance to win a free signed copy of my book. (US destinations only.)

I’ve been a writer my whole life. I know how to craft a sentence. I know how to shape a story arc. What I apparently do not know how to do — at least not gracefully — is talk about my own book on camera without feeling like I’m standing in the middle of my own living room in my underwear.

And yet, here we are.

A little while ago, I sat down with Alan Locher on The Locher Room to talk about The Luck We Carry — the book I spent years writing, the one that grew out of grief and journals and a lot of late nights with a fountain pen and absolutely no plan. Alan is a genuinely warm interviewer, which helped. So did the fact that he’d actually read the book, which — if you’ve ever been interviewed by someone who clearly hasn’t — you know is not to be taken for granted.

We talked about Ken. We talked about what it means to move with grief instead of away from it. We talked about writing as survival, not just expression — the idea that some of us don’t process the world until we’ve put it on paper. (If you’re reading this on Substack, I suspect you might know something about that.)

What I didn’t expect was how much the conversation would feel like the book itself — the way the good stuff tends to come out sideways, in the middle of something else, when you’re not bracing for it.

There’s a moment in the interview where Alan asks me about the message Ken left with his hospice grief counselor — the words she held onto for months and delivered to me on a warm August night while I sat in the garden with a glass of cabernet. I still am. Together we still be. We’re still here. We still exist together.

I’ve said those words out loud a hundred times now. And they still land like the first time.

That’s what The Luck We Carry is about, really. Not the loss — though the loss is there, honest and unvarnished. It’s about what remains. What gets carried forward. What love looks like after it changes shape.

Watch the interview below. And if something in it moves you, I hope you’ll consider pre-ordering the book — because the best gift you can give a debut author before launch is proof that someone’s waiting.

👉 Pre-order The Luck We Carry here.

Join my newsletter before March 23 and I’ll randomly select 10 people (US addresses only) to receive a free signed copy of my book.

The launch is March 23rd. I’d love for you to be part of it.

It was August, a few months after my husband Ken died. I’d poured a glass of cabernet and carried it out to the garden he’d tended for years. The angel trumpets were in bloom, their sweet scent lingering around me. Their aroma competed with the way summer evenings smell when you’re simultaneously grateful and gutted.

I was about to read a message Ken had left me—words I didn’t know he spoke. Words I didn’t think were possible to exist.

Our hospice grief counselor, Claire, had visited him every week during his final months. In their last conversations—before she moved back to Los Angeles, before he died—she’d asked if there was anything he wanted her to tell me after he was gone. She’d typed his words directly into her phone so she’d have them exact. She waited until she saw me in person, at a sidewalk café on a warm night a few months after he died, to make sure I was ready to receive them.

Sitting in that garden with his message open on my phone, hands trembling, I read what he’d asked her to share:

I still am.
Together we still be.
We’re still here.
We still exist together.

I read those words aloud, again and again, until they sounded like prayer.

That night, I understood something I hadn’t been able to name before: I wasn’t going to move on from Ken. And I didn’t have to.

The Problem With “Moving On”

From the moment someone we love dies, the world begins quietly—and sometimes not so quietly—encouraging us toward a destination called “over it.” People mean well. They want to see us okay. They offer timelines, stages, and reassurances that things will get back to normal.

But “moving on” has always felt like a betrayal dressed up as progress. It implies leaving something behind. Closing a chapter. Returning to a version of yourself that, honestly, no longer exists.

After Ken died, I tried to perform okay-ness. Four months after he was gone, I went alone to see a movie about a young man with cancer. I posted on social media to prove I was “out in the world.” I walked home convinced I’d had a breakthrough. I hadn’t. I’d just been very convincing.

Grief doesn’t reward performance. It waits until you’re honest.

What “Moving With” Actually Looks Like

“Moving with” is different. It doesn’t ask you to leave anyone behind. It asks you to carry them differently.

In the years after Ken died, I noticed him everywhere—not as a ghost, but as a presence woven into the fabric of ordinary days. In the way I packed a camping tub with the same obsessive care he used. In the impulse to make a joke at exactly the wrong moment. In the courage it takes to say yes to something terrifying, which was always his greatest gift to me.

Moving with means your grief becomes a companion rather than an obstacle. It means the person you lost isn’t in the past—they’re in you, shaping how you see, how you love, how you show up. The loss doesn’t disappear. It integrates.

I once wrote a letter to myself from the future—sitting in a hospital room while Ken was still alive, borrowing strength from a version of myself I couldn’t yet see. I wrote that someday, when I thought of him, I’d feel no sadness. Only joy and gratitude. That he would be “only gone in one respect, but ever present in so many more.”

I didn’t believe it when I wrote it. But I wrote it anyway. And that act — the willingness to imagine healing before it existed—became its own kind of faith.

The Shift That Changes Everything

There’s a particular moment—and I can’t tell you exactly when it arrived, because it didn’t announce itself—when I stopped measuring my life against the one I’d lost and started living the one I had.

Not instead of Ken. Alongside him.

I started camping again—something I’d been sure I could never do without him. The same percolator. The same tent. The first morning I heard that familiar hiss and burble on the camp stove, I didn’t fall apart. It filled me. He was there in the ritual he’d built, in the way he’d labeled every container and packed the foil and salt. He was taking care of me still.

That’s what moving with looks like. It’s not dramatic. It doesn’t look like healing in the movies. It looks like a cup of coffee at a campsite. It looks like laughing at a joke you know he would have made first.

A Note for Where You Might Be Right Now

If you’re early in loss, I’m not going to tell you this is what you’ll feel eventually—because that’s the kind of thing people say that lands like a stone thrown into deep water. Unhelpful, no matter how true.

What I will say is this: you don’t have to be over it to be okay. You don’t have to close the chapter to open a new one. The love you carry isn’t a weight you need to set down—it’s part of what holds you up.

Ken’s message from that garden still sits framed where I can see it. We still exist together. Not as a comfort I reach for only in dark moments—as a fact I live inside every day.

That’s the difference. Moving on asks you to leave. Moving with asks you to become.

These essays—and so many more—are collected in my book The Luck We Carry: Love, Loss, and the Stories That Shape Us. You can find more information and pre-order the ebook here. Launch day is March 23, 2026—the 25^th anniversary of when I met Ken and fell in love with him.

If something here resonated, I’d be grateful if you’d share it with someone who might need it. If you want to follow along, join the newsletter here for sneak peeks and inside info.

Writing became the place where I could put everything down on the table and try to make sense of it. I wrote while he was in hospice, and after he died, I wrote even more. Pages and pages. Some of those early pieces eventually became the essays in The Luck We Carry.

But when I began shaping the book, I realized I wanted to do something a little different.

Each essay is followed by an author’s note—where the current version of me looks back at the moment the essay was written and connects the dots. It’s the perspective that only comes with time.

Because grief is a landscape.

And when you’re walking through it, there aren’t many markers to tell you where you are.

My hope is that this book might be one small marker for someone else. A reminder that someone has been here before—and that you will find your way forward.

📖 The Luck We Carry: Love, Loss, and the Stories That Shape Us

E-book preorders are open now, and the paperback releases March 23.

If the story resonates, I’d love for you to:

• Preorder the book: https://ronstempkowski.com/where-to-buy-the-luck-we-carry/

• Join my newsletter for writing, reflections, and updates: https://ronstempkowski.com/join-the-journey/

• Comment and share so more people who might need this story can find it

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Some early readers have already finished The Luck We Carry, and the notes they’ve sent have meant more to me than I can say. Knowing that people are connecting with these stories—and getting to know Ken through them—is exactly what I hoped for when I started writing.

If you’ve read an advance copy and haven’t left a review yet, it would mean a lot if you added one on Goodreads and later on Amazon when the book launches.

Preorders for the ebook are open now, and the paperback arrives on March 23.

If you’d like updates from the writing desk, behind-the-scenes stories, and a few things I don’t share anywhere else, join my newsletter here.

And if this resonates, feel free to share it with someone who might need these stories.

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After Ken died, everything felt unfamiliar. Writing became the one place that still made sense.

Some of these essays began as raw blog posts written in the middle of hospice and the long, quiet after. For this book, I revisited, reshaped, and tightened them. But I also did something new. At the end of every essay, I added an author’s note. The present-day me looking back at the man who first wrote those words. Connecting the dots. Naming what I did not yet understand.

I think of The Luck We Carry as a map of my own grief. Not a map anyone else has to follow. But maybe a marker. A signpost that says, someone else has stood here. You are not as alone as you feel.

If you’re walking through loss, my hope is that this book meets you wherever you are and reminds you that you will be okay.

The e-book is available for pre-order now, and the paperback releases on March 23. I would love for you to reserve your copy and join my newsletter so we can stay connected as this book makes its way into the world.

Pre-order through the link in my bio and sign up for the newsletter for behind-the-scenes notes and early updates.

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I expected notes.

That’s what you brace for when you hand something precious to an editor. You expect margin comments. Structural concerns. A polite but firm list of things that need work. What I did not expect was to be told, in calm, measured language, that the book already does what it set out to do.

The response began by describing my manuscript as “a collection of well-crafted essays assembled as a sort of episodic memoir,” and went on to talk about how grief is present but not overpowering, used as a catalyst rather than a conclusion. The language was described as polished. No errors were found. None at all.

That should have felt like relief. Instead, my first reaction was discomfort. Because when someone doesn’t tell you what to fix, your mind starts hunting for what they certainly must have missed.

We’re conditioned that way. Especially those of us who write personal work. We learn early that doubt is safer than confidence. Doubt keeps you sharp. Doubt keeps you revising. Doubt protects you from embarrassment. Confidence, on the other hand, feels like tempting fate.

The editor went on to say something that stuck with me. He noted that collections like this often stumble when analysis gets in the way of story, that reflection can fracture a reading experience or feel indulgent. And then he said, essentially, that my book avoids that trap. That’s the part that really landed.

Because that structure wasn’t accidental. It was instinctive. It came from years of writing privately, journaling in real time, then returning later to understand what I’d written and why. I didn’t map it out. I trusted it. And trusting yourself is terrifying.

The editor wrote about how the book doesn’t end with grief, how it moves forward into life ten years later, and how the narrative weaves back and forth in time rather than offering a tidy epilogue. He pointed out that the story doesn’t stop where loss occurs—that the life continues; that the writing shows distance, perspective, movement.

Those are not things you can fake on the page. They’re earned. Slowly. Often painfully. And reading that feedback stirred up something I wasn’t prepared for. Because if the work holds, if it’s doing what I hoped it might do, then the lingering unease isn’t about the book at all. It’s about me.

About how uncomfortable it can feel to let something stand without apology. About how easy it is to believe critique and how hard it is to receive affirmation without immediately qualifying it. About how self-doubt often masquerades as humility.

The editor closed by saying the language was polished and that finding no errors in a manuscript this length was unusual. “So kudos,” he wrote. Simple. Direct. No caveats. I sat with that longer than I expected to. Because maybe the real work now isn’t revision. Maybe it’s allowing myself to believe that this book is what it needed to be.

If you’re someone who creates, writes, builds, or makes meaning out of your own life, you might recognize this moment. The one where the feedback is good and your instinct is to argue with it. If that’s you, you’re not alone. We’re taught to doubt ourselves far more thoroughly than we’re taught to trust our voice. I’m learning, slowly, to do the latter.

If you’d like to follow along as I move closer to sharing this book with the world, including the title reveal, cover design, and early excerpts, I’d love to have you.

👉 Subscribe to my newsletter at ronstempkowski.com/join-the-journey. That’s where I share the honest, behind-the-scenes parts of this process as it unfolds.

And if this resonated, feel free to share it. Naming self-doubt is one way of loosening its grip.

#amwriting #authorlife #writingjourney #selfdoubt #memoirinessays #griefwriting #creativeprocess #trustyourvoice

Every New Year’s Eve, I sit down with a stack of envelopes filled with memories from the past year and take stock. Not in a loud, goal-setting kind of way, but in a quieter, more honest one.

This video walks through my New Year’s Eve reflection ritual. What I look back on. And how writing helps me notice the throughlines between who I was this year and who I’m becoming next.

If you’re someone who likes to mark transitions thoughtfully, or if you’re curious about using writing as a way to close one chapter before opening the next, this one’s for you.

✍️ My books & journals:
Starring Me! Journal: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FMQZFXMK
Amazon Author Page: http://amazon.com/author/ronstempkowski

📬 Join my newsletter Personal essays, behind-the-scenes writing life, and what’s coming next: https://ronstempkowski.com/join-the-journey/

🌐 Find me elsewhere
Website: https://ronstempkowski.com/blog/
Instagram: http://instagram.com/ronstempkowski
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/share/1HAsjQtyGw/?mibextid=wwXIfr
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ronstempkowski/

Thanks for being here. If this resonates, subscribe and come along for what’s unfolding next.

#NewYearsReflection #WritingRitual #EndOfYearReflection #JournalingPractice #WriterLife #ReflectiveWriting #NewYearsEveRitual #PersonalEssay #WritingCommunity #Coming2026

2026 is shaping up to be a year of intention, creativity, and a big chapter finally stepping into the light. Not overnight. Not out of nowhere. But built slowly, honestly, and on paper.

I’m not ready to share all the details just yet. But if you’ve been following my writing, my journaling practice, and the way I tell stories about love, loss, and reinvention, you’re already closer than you think.

If you want to be the first to know what’s coming, my newsletter is where I’m sharing it. No algorithms. No noise. Just words, process, and what’s unfolding next.

Link in bio to join me, or here: https://ronstempkowski.com/join-the-journey/

#ComingIn2026 #TheWritingLife #WriterLife #OnPaper #WorkInProgress #CreativeLife #GriefAndGrowth #Storytelling #NewsletterCommunity

While I was outside with Hudson yesterday, one of my neighbors was out with her dog, Ripley. Hudson and Ripley like to “talk” and play without regard for the fence between them. As I turned to leave them to their games, my neighbor Barbara said, “Merry Christmas,” and handed me a gift bag.

Inside were a few thoughtful things. Frangos. Fannie Mae. A treat for Hudson. Simple, kind, not over-the-top. Tucked in with it was a handwritten note that stopped me in my tracks.

“To Ron & Hudson. Best neighbors ever. Merry X-Mas.”

That was it. No long explanation. No grand gesture. Just a reminder that someone nearby sees us. Knows us. Thought of us.

And I felt it in my chest.

We talk a lot about connection like it has to be big or life-altering to count. Deep conversations. Long histories. Major milestones. But sometimes connection looks like this. A knock on the door. A note written in pen. A moment of “you matter” without fanfare.

Being a good neighbor isn’t about perfection or constant availability. It’s about presence. It’s about noticing. It’s about choosing kindness when you could just keep moving.

I didn’t always understand how much that mattered to me. Especially after loss, when the world can feel smaller and quieter in ways you didn’t ask for. Connection doesn’t always come roaring back. Sometimes it tiptoes in.

And when it does, it reminds me that community doesn’t have to be loud to be meaningful. That belonging can live right outside your front door. That fulfillment isn’t only found in big dreams or future plans, but in the ordinary goodness of shared space and mutual care.

This gift didn’t just make my day. It grounded me. It reminded me why I try to show up the way I do. Why being kind, open, and human still feels like the most important work I can do.

I’m grateful for neighbors who turn proximity into connection. (I’ve been lucky in this regard for a long time.) And I’m reminded that sometimes, the smallest gestures carry the most weight.

If this resonates with you, I write more like this in my newsletter. Honest reflections on connection, grief, reinvention, and the quiet moments that shape us.

You can join me there. I’d love to have you.

Join the newsletter.

#Gratitude #CommunityMatters #BeingHuman #ConnectionOverEverything #EverydayKindness #LifeNotes #TheWritingLife #Neighbors #ChooseConnection

People talk about resilience like it’s some inner superpower you either have or you don’t. I’ve never bought that. Most of the changes that shaped me didn’t arrive with a cape. They showed up as ordinary days that asked a little more of me than I felt like giving.

Some moments knock you flat. Some just take the wind out of you. And every so often, something small—a memory, a sentence, a golden retriever staring at you like he already knows the answer—nudges you forward again.

I’ve learned that resilience isn’t about bouncing back. I don’t know anyone who bounces. It’s more of a slow, uneven motion toward yourself. It’s choosing to keep writing the next line, even when you don’t know where the story is headed. It’s giving yourself room to be undone without assuming that’s the end of the plot.

My own resilience has grown in the quiet places: mornings when grief felt louder than the coffee maker, nights when the page held more truth than I wanted to say out loud, days when the smallest bit of progress counted as a win. It wasn’t dramatic or cinematic. It was consistent. It was imperfect. It was mine.

And maybe that’s the real heart of it: resilience isn’t a finish line. It’s a way of meeting yourself again and again, even when the version you’re meeting is tired or grieving or trying to remember why this chapter matters.

If you’re in a season that feels heavy or uncertain, you’re not doing it wrong. You’re just in the middle of the story. Keep going. There’s more ahead—you just haven’t written it yet.

If you want more behind-the-scenes moments, writing updates, and the road to what’s coming in 2026, subscribe to my newsletter. I’d love to have you along.

I look at those early posts now and see a writer who was still figuring out how to speak without apologizing for it. I also see moments of joy, grief, reinvention, and a kind of quiet determination I didn’t have the language for yet. Life was shifting in ways I couldn’t have predicted, and somehow this corner of the internet became the place where I learned how to stay grounded.

Over the years, the writing grew up with me. It held the before and after of losing Ken. It held the long, uneven road of stepping into a new version of myself. It held the creative sparks that eventually became books, journals, and Twisted Plot Paper. It held the days when I felt cracked open and the days when I finally felt steady again.

What these fifteen years have taught me is simple, but not easy:

• Writing is connection. Even when it feels like you’re typing into the void, someone always finds themselves in your words.

• Vulnerability is truth. It isn’t about oversharing. It’s about telling the truth you’re actually ready to tell.

• Reinvention isn’t a single moment. It’s a lifelong practice, and it shows up whether you’re ready or not.

• Carrying the people you’ve lost forward with you can be its own kind of courage.

There are posts that still sit with me. Pieces I wrote in the early days of grief. Essays that cracked something open. Moments when honesty felt like a risk but turned out to be what connected me to people I’d never met. Those posts remind me why I keep coming back here.

The unexpected gifts have been the best part. The community that quietly formed around these stories. The messages from readers who told me they felt less alone because of something I wrote. The way this site opened doors to new projects, new creative chapters, and new versions of myself I hadn’t met yet.

But the thing I’m most proud of is that I stayed with it. I showed up. Not perfectly. Not consistently. But honestly. And that’s enough.

As for what’s next—well, if you’ve been following along, you know something big is taking shape for 2026. The kind of thing you only get to make after years of learning, unlearning, experimenting, and trusting the work to lead you somewhere new. I can’t wait to tell you more.

Thank you for being here, whether you’ve been reading for fifteen years or fifteen minutes. You’ve made this space what it is. Here’s to the next chapter.

If you want the behind-the-scenes of what’s coming, you can join my newsletter. That’s where the real story lives.

Fifteen years. I had to sit with that number for a minute. I started this blog in a very different version of my life, long before I knew how much the words would hold, or how many times they’d help me climb out of whatever I was carrying. Back then, I didn’t have a plan. I just knew I needed a place to put the truth.

I look at those early posts now and see a writer who was still figuring out how to speak without apologizing for it. I also see moments of joy, grief, reinvention, and a kind of quiet determination I didn’t have the language for yet. Life was shifting in ways I couldn’t have predicted, and somehow this corner of the internet became the place where I learned how to stay grounded.

Over the years, the writing grew up with me. It held the before and after of losing Ken. It held the long, uneven road of stepping into a new version of myself. It held the creative sparks that eventually became books, journals, and Twisted Plot Paper. It held the days when I felt cracked open and the days when I finally felt steady again.

What these fifteen years have taught me is simple, but not easy:

• Writing is connection. Even when it feels like you’re typing into the void, someone always finds themselves in your words.

• Vulnerability is truth. It isn’t about oversharing. It’s about telling the truth you’re actually ready to tell.

• Reinvention isn’t a single moment. It’s a lifelong practice, and it shows up whether you’re ready or not.

• Carrying the people you’ve lost forward with you can be its own kind of courage.

There are posts that still sit with me. Pieces I wrote in the early days of grief. Essays that cracked something open. Moments when honesty felt like a risk but turned out to be what connected me to people I’d never met. Those posts remind me why I keep coming back here.

The unexpected gifts have been the best part. The community that quietly formed around these stories. The messages from readers who told me they felt less alone because of something I wrote. The way this site opened doors to new projects, new creative chapters, and new versions of myself I hadn’t met yet.

But the thing I’m most proud of is that I stayed with it. I showed up. Not perfectly. Not consistently. But honestly. And that’s enough.

As for what’s next—well, if you’ve been following along, you know something big is taking shape for 2026. The kind of thing you only get to make after years of learning, unlearning, experimenting, and trusting the work to lead you somewhere new. I can’t wait to tell you more.

Thank you for being here, whether you’ve been reading for fifteen years or fifteen minutes. You’ve made this space what it is. Here’s to the next chapter.

If you want the behind-the-scenes of what’s coming, you can join my newsletter. That’s where the real story lives.