A Memoir by Kettia Etienne Ming
For the woman who has outgrown who she used to be, and doesn't yet know what comes next.
Run the Mile You're In is a memoir about starting over, and the permission you didn't know you were waiting for. A story, told honestly. No framework, no homework.
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There's a season nobody warns you about.
Women in this season describe it in words that sound nothing like a midlife crisis and everything like a slow disappearance. Drained, with no energy for things they used to love. Feeling like nobody, after decades of being everything to everyone. Watching time pass and realizing the exhaustion was never about being busy. It is about being invisible to yourself.
Underneath the stuckness, it is rarely confusion. It is fear. Fear of the unknown, fear of disappointing people, fear that wanting more is selfish after years of putting everyone else first.
And the loneliest part: the certainty that you are the only one going through this. You are not. This may be one of the most common seasons a woman ever moves through. It is just the one nobody talks about at dinner.
It arrives quietly, usually after years of doing everything right. The career built. The family raised. The role of reliable one played so well that nobody thinks to ask how you are actually doing.
And somewhere in the middle of that competence, a quiet feeling: you have outgrown who you used to be, and you have no clear sense of what comes next.
You still show up. You still hold it together. But something underneath has gone flat, and you know something needs to change. You just keep not facing it, because facing it means disappointing someone.
You are not looking for another five-step plan. You want peace. Clarity. Maybe just one honest voice saying: I know this season. I have been in it.
This book is a mirror, not a manual.
Run the Mile You're In is my story, told the way I would tell it to a friend at the kitchen table.
I built a childcare company from my basement into four Manhattan locations. I sold it in a multimillion-dollar acquisition, the kind of ending that looks like winning from the outside. Then the company that bought it sued me for $1.5 million over a non-compete, and the legal battle that followed nearly broke me. My marriage did not survive it. I chose a strategic bankruptcy with my head up, and then came the hardest part: figuring out who I was when everything I had built, and the woman I had built myself into, was gone.
This book will not hand you a plan for your life. It does something different. It gives language to what you have been feeling and proof that a woman can lose the identity she spent decades building and find something truer on the other side.
The promise is simple. You may not finish this book with all the answers. You will finish it knowing you are not alone in the question.
Strangers keep writing me letters about this book.
“I cry about every 25 pages.”
— Anna G.“Kettia - You gave all Moms and me the greatest Mother’s Day gift by writing this book. Words cannot express how much your words spoke to me and have made me think of a lot of issues that in my mind I always dance around and just push through.”
— Sonia A. “Thank you Kettia for your vulnerability and for your wisdom. I definitely feel less alone in this quest of finding myself. In your book, I literally found a friend. Someone that I could spend time talking with honesty and vulnerability.”
— Liz C. Since the book came out, readers have written long, personal letters, asked to meet me in person, and offered to pass the book to friends they knew would recognize themselves in it.
I read every one, and they are the reason this page exists.
“Ming sells the business, watches everyone else get paid first, leaves Manhattan, moves to Westchester, buys a car online, eats takeout among boxes, and learns the strange grammar of living alone. After years of designing rooms where other people's children could feel safe, she begins to design one for herself.
That is the final reversal. The book begins with a child's silence as alarm. It ends with a woman's silence as restoration. Not defeat. Not vacancy. The first room in years where no one is waiting with a need, and no one has to be saved before she sits down.”
— Demetris, P., NetGalley
This book is for you if:
You did everything you were supposed to do, and something is still missing.
01
You are the one everyone leans on, and nobody has asked lately if you are okay.
02
A chapter of your life has closed, a business, a marriage, a full house, a title, and you are still learning who you are without it.
03
You know something needs to shift, and you keep finding reasons to deal with it later.
04
You want to feel less alone in this season more than you want another plan for fixing it.
05
This didn’t start as a book.
It started as journaling. Pages I wrote to survive the season, never intending anyone to read them. For twenty years my identity had a shape: founder, wife, the one who made everything work. Then the acquisition, the lawsuit, the bankruptcy, the divorce. Every title I had answered to was gone within a few short years, and writing was how I found out who was still there.
Somewhere in those pages I realized I was writing the book I had needed and could not find. Not an expert on a stage telling me five steps to reinvention. A woman a few miles ahead on the same road, telling the truth about what it costs and what it gives back.
I wrote it as a Black woman entrepreneur who refused to disappear. I published it because of every woman who has ever sat in a full life and felt like nobody. If that is you, this story is yours too.
You don't have to to have anything figured out to start reading. That is rather the point.
Run the mile you're in. Start with this one.
Available now in the formats below. If it finds you the way it has found other women, I would love to hear from you. I read every letter.
“Ming’s prose moves like someone taking an emergency call while still trying to tell the truth.”
— Demetris, P.