For more than forty years, Ken Pienkos has lived with HIV—and with the memories, losses, absurdities, tenderness, anger, and unexpected grace of a life that refused to be defined by it.

Being Still gathers cathartic expressions of survival and witness: moments of pain and humor, longing and defiance, ordinary people remembered, and the stubborn strength found in continuing to look, feel, and share.

These are deeply personal pieces, but they reach beyond one life. They ask what happens when we tell the things we have carried quietly—and who, hearing them, might recognize something of themselves and say, me too.