What is Unfixed?
Unfixed is a storytelling sanctuary for those living in the in-between. What began as a documentary exploration of life with a rare neurological disorder has grown into a multidisciplinary platform honoring the messy, mysterious, and miraculous ways we live, heal, and belong—especially when nothing gets tied up with a bow.
Here on Substack, Unfixed offers a living companion to this ethos:
— lyrical essays from my memoir Unfixed: A Story of Family, Mystery, and the Currents That Carry You Home
— the “In Defense of…” series, which reclaims the overlooked and misunderstood
— soul-stretching interviews with writers, artists, and truth-tellers exploring uncertainty, illness, identity, and the creative life
If you’ve ever found yourself outside the bounds of resolution—between diagnoses, between answers, between stories—you belong here. This is not a place for fix-it culture, but for communion. For loosening the grip on linear progress. For remembering that wholeness has less to do with perfection, and more to do with presence.
Welcome to the unfixed life.
Navigate to Where do I begin? to start reading today!
My memoir
PREORDER today! Available anywhere you buy books. (October 2025 Empress Editions)
Unfixed: A Memoir of Family, Mystery, and the Currents that Carry You Home is a lyrical exploration of identity, inheritance, and the deep wisdom of the body.
When a midlife DNA test reveals that the man who raised her isn’t her biological father, Kimberly Warner is thrust into two parallel mysteries—one unspooling her beloved father’s untimely death, the other tracing the disappearance of a stranger whose blood lives inside her. As she dives into the cracks beneath her family’s foundation, another fault-line opens: her body begins to betray her. Chronic illness, trauma, and unexplained dizziness dismantle her sense of control, forcing her to live in the very place she’s always feared—uncertainty.
Told through prose, poetry, and imagined correspondence, Unfixed carries readers across time and terrain—from the New Age spiritualism of Kimberly’s 1980s childhood to the tidal shifts of midlife—where the body speaks in symptoms and the soul insists on wholeness.
This is not a story of resolution, but of rhythm. Of learning to loosen the grip on linear answers. Of trading the map for the water.
For anyone navigating the ache of not-knowing—for those who have searched for home in diagnosis, DNA, or someone else’s approval—Unfixed offers a quiet revolution: that healing may not mean closure, but communion. That wholeness was never about perfection, but presence.
And that the current we fear the most might just be the one that carries us home.
About me
Kimberly Warner is a filmmaker, author, and founder of Unfixed Media, a storytelling platform dedicated to illuminating the lives of people living with chronic illness and disability. With a background in pre-medical sciences and naturopathic medicine, Kimberly’s creative work bridges body and story, science and soul.
In 2019, she launched the award-winning Unfixed Docuseries, which grew into a dynamic portfolio of films, limited series, podcasts, patient memoirs, and live roundtables. Her projects have been recognized by the Invisible Disabilities Association, Life on the Level, and PBS’s Brief But Spectacular. She is also the author of Unfixed: A Memoir of Family, Mystery, and the Currents That Carry You Home, forthcoming from Empress Editions in October 2025.
Kimberly’s work explores themes of identity, impermanence, and relational healing through a lens of lived experience—inviting audiences to rethink what it means to be whole. Her stories have reached international audiences through Harvard Medical School, Global Genes, BBC Radio, and Dani Shapiro’s Family Secrets podcast.
She is a member of the Patient and Physician Advocacy Alliance, a visiting faculty member with Global Genes, and serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Health Design. Her current project, Unfixed: The Art of Living in Time, is a feature film that revisits several original documentary participants years later to explore how time shapes our relationship with illness, self, and meaning.
She lives in Oregon and continues to chronicle what it means to live unfixed—through film, essays, and everyday acts of presence.
