I’m Eddie Stephens, trial lawyer, storyteller, and lifelong curator of the moments that refuse to stay quiet.
I grew up learning, early and abruptly, that life doesn’t always follow the rules it’s supposed to. Loss arrived before I had language for it, and grief rearranged everything: my home, my identity, my relationship with school, and the way I moved through the world.
Somewhere in that collapse, I found my first real map—Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey—and it gave me a framework for what I was already living: the call, the rupture, the road, the return. That mythology didn’t erase what happened. It helped me carry it.
Professionally, I’ve spent my adult life in family law. I’ve watched how trauma can echo through generations, how love and fear can share the same sentence, and how a single choice in a single moment can change the rest of a person’s story.
My work is grounded in responsibility and advocacy, but it’s fueled by something more personal: a deep respect for what it takes to rebuild after the ordinary world ends.
This book is a collection of chapters that trace the strange, hard, funny, and sacred pieces of the path—memories I’ve carried for years and stories I’m finally ready to tell.
Some are painful. Some are absurd. Some are both. All of them are true in the way that matters: they shaped me.
If you’re reading this, you’re holding my attempt to make meaning without pretending everything happens for a reason. It doesn’t. But we can still choose what we do with what happened.
We can still answer the call.
Core Memories 