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 haunting exploration of identity, loss, and the unsteady ground of becoming.
When a midlife DNA test reveals that the man who raised her isn’t her biological father, Kimberly Warner is drawn into two parallel mysteries: one excavating the silence surrounding her beloved father’s death, the other tracing the absence of a stranger whose blood shapes her very being.
As she unravels the secrets hidden beneath her family’s story, another rupture emerges—this time in her body. A mysterious illness takes hold, leaving her adrift in dizziness, and a growing awareness that her body knows truths language cannot hold.
Told through lyrical prose and imagined correspondence, Unfixed carries readers across decades and terrain, from the New Age spirituality of Warner’s 1980s childhood to the tidal unpredictability of midlife, where certainty dissolves and the soul insists on truth.
This is not a memoir of resolution, but of reckoning. For anyone who has sought refuge in the known, Unfixed offers a quiet transformation: healing not as closure, but as relationship. Wholeness not as solidity, but as the willingness to remain present to what is.
With echoes of Inheritance, and the emotional undercurrents of Where the Crawdads Sing, Unfixed reveals the beauty and heartbreak of uncovering truths long buried. It is a celebration of the body’s wisdom, the resilience of the human spirit, and a poignant reminder that even in the most uncertain lives, there is space for hope, connection, and becoming. And what feels like drift may be the current carrying 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.
