Hello! I’m Stephanie.
Welcome to Lumani Unfiltered.
If we were sitting together on the couch right now, we’d probably be drinking delicious coffee with a cozy blanket, talking about the parts of life we don’t always say out loud. The confusing parts. The funny parts. The emotional parts. The ones we carry quietly until someone else goes, “Oh my God, same.”
That’s what this space is for.
I’ve spent twenty years inside healthcare as a nurse and leading care management teams, but the moments that shaped me weren’t the official ones — they were the human ones. Trying to understand a bolded number in my patient portal at 10 p.m. Sitting in the car after an appointment replaying everything I forgot to ask. Laughing with girlfriends about how we now need reading glasses at restaurants. Googling things I really shouldn’t have Googled. Helping people I love figure out what their bodies, their emotions, or their care were trying to tell them.
Those moments, the in-between, imperfect, unfiltered ones, are where I write from.
Every week, I offer a personal essay, a midweek reflection, a Thursday moment sparked by the world around us, and a Friday mantra to help you breathe a little easier. Sometimes the writing is tender. Sometimes it’s messy. Sometimes it’s funny in a way that makes you cover your face while reading. Sometimes it’s about care and what it feels like to move through it as a human being with history and hormones and a life. Sometimes it’s about womanhood and identity and aging and intuition. Sometimes it’s just something I’m working through, wondering about, or trying to understand.
My writing isn’t about fixing anything or telling you what to do. It’s about naming the moments we all live through but rarely talk about. It’s about connection. It’s about honesty. It’s about making space for the real, unpolished parts of being a person.
If you’re someone who feels deeply, who notices things, who laughs at the wrong moment, who spirals over a lab result and then talks about it with your friends, who is trying to grow into the next version of yourself while still caring for everyone around you, this is your place.
“Lumani” means illumination — not the bright, harsh kind, but the soft glow that helps you see what you couldn’t see before. It comes from pieces of my Filipino and Hawaiian roots — lumi, luna, lani — words tied to light, sky, and perspective. That’s the energy I try to bring into my writing: warmth, clarity, and gentle truth.
Thanks for being here.
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Welcome to Lumani Unfiltered.
Stay curious, and be gentle with yourself.
