The pit in my stomach is green. Slimy snot green, green as putrid algae gathering at the edge of stagnant water, the stench of something fermenting in darkness, and it sits there rude and wet while I stare at this page wondering how exactly one defends disappointment, because disappointment feels so graceless when you are inside it, so humiliating and nakedly human, and yet here I am again in this ongoing practice of turning toward the things I would rather sneak around, the things I would rather outrun with silver linings or spiritual language or productivity or simple disappearance.

Let’s back up. I need to reverse engineer how I got here, where much of my life I’ve lived with low expectations and therefore am delightfully surprised by even the wad of gum on my shoe. I learned early that modest expectations amplify gratitude and are an effective hedge against despair, which is perhaps why disappointment feels so violent when it finally arrives. It means somewhere along the way I allowed myself to want something. The last time I remember feeling this level of collapse was during the long years trying to cure the dizziness. After one particularly expensive and elaborate Neurolinguistic Healing Program, I spent eight weeks marching past-present-future patterns across Mom’s basement floor repeating affirmations about stillness and ease while imagining my future healed self waiting ahead of me like a patient midwife at the threshold of my own rebirth. I can laugh about it now, but at the time I wanted it with an animal sincerity. I wanted my life back. I wanted my body back. I wanted a future ready to receive that body back into the world.

Last November my memoir launched and something astonishing happened: readers found it, landing right in that soft spot beneath the breastbone. In many ways, the response echoed what I’ve experienced for years through my work with Unfixed—my media platform centered around chronic illness—hundreds if not thousands of messages from strangers describing moments of recognition, relief, revelation, people saying these stories helped them feel less alone inside bodies and lives that rarely receive sustained cultural attention. It’s been more beautiful than anything I had trained myself to expect, and because life seems devoted to paradox, beauty arrived carrying vulnerability inside it from the very beginning. The more deeply I loved the work, the more power I unconsciously began assigning outside the work itself, to institutions, gatekeepers, outcomes, and all the shimmering structures humans build around creative output. And slowly I began mistaking those external structures for the source itself. Alongside all that genuine human resonance has existed another reality entirely, one far harder to swallow, the ongoing experience of making work that visibly matters to people while remaining structurally unsupported by the very systems designed to determine what counts as valuable, fundable, visible, sustainable.

Over the years I’ve applied for more grants than I can count and received almost nothing in return financially despite the overwhelming evidence that the work itself is alive in people, offering pieces of my nervous system to institutions tasked with deciding which stories deserve amplification and which remain tucked quietly into dusty corners of the cultural imagination. The work keeps generating one form of abundance while starving in the currencies required to continue it. Sometime around last month I threw up my hands after yet another grant refusal, another closed door, and another rejection, and said, “I’m worn out.” What I really meant was: I’m so, so, so very disappointed.

It’s hiding right there in the word itself: dis-appoint, a mistaken appointment. I’ve been handing over my power to the wrong source. Oh! Something loosened in my chest the moment I saw it. How often have I appointed authority outside the living thing itself, outside the pulse already moving through the work, as though the stethoscope drives the heartbeat? How often have I treated external systems as though they were the true guardians of creative aliveness?

The truth is, Unfixed was alive long before anyone else touched her. She was alive when I lived her. She was alive when film subjects first shared their stories on camera, alive when I started writing my own memoir inside the eye of the storm. Alive when she reached another nervous system and made a stranger feel less alone at 2am in Illinois or Portland or Dublin or wherever these little paper boats wash ashore. Creativity is a strange creature. We think we are carrying art into the world when often it’s carrying us, moving through the world the way water does, along hidden channels beneath the visible surface of things, finding the people they are meant to find regardless of our attempts to direct the flow.

Even with this realization settling slowly into place, disappointment exposes the bruises in me. Some old insecurity that I am not quite real enough to deserve solidity. That I am allowed to make things, perhaps even beautiful things, so long as I do not ask too much of the world in return. What hurts is how quickly disappointment finds the oldest wounds and draws blood from them again, how efficiently it recruits every ancient suspicion I have ever carried about myself, all the lingering fears that perhaps I am still pretending somehow, that I have slipped accidentally into rooms meant for real filmmakers, real writers, real artists, real adults who understand how to move through the world with cleaner edges and less permeability. Suddenly my body remembers all its old humiliations at once. There is a particular shame that blooms when trust meets fracture because I immediately begin scanning my own openness for evidence of foolishness, as though vulnerability itself were my error, as though remaining soft-hearted and hopeful in a world organized around transaction were evidence of some fundamental naïveté or misunderstanding about reality.

And while disappointment unexamined wants to flatten people and systems into villains, that would require denying the moments of genuine goodness that also exist alongside the frustration and defeat. Human beings are rarely one thing for very long. We love and fail simultaneously. Warmth and blindness coexist more often than we want them to. We wound each other while meaning well. The complexity of this has been the hardest part to metabolize because disappointment would be easier if people and organizations and systems were simply monstrous. Instead everything we are, everything we’ve created, remains painfully, bewilderingly human, carrying unspoken fears and failures and blind spots and ambitions and fractures and all the unseen architectures determining what gets valued and what disappears.

And then, because disappointment apparently enjoys dramatic timing, other heartbreaks began arriving in quick succession, little assaults accumulating faster than I could digest. A hope carried, dissolving. A trust breached somewhere unexpected. A casual cruelty landing on the internet. Another door closing somewhere I had briefly imagined entering. The pile-on became almost absurd in its thoroughness. By then disappointment was following me home and tucking me at night in with her sad bedtime story.

Disappointment alters the texture of time itself because inside disappointment the future retracts abruptly and deposits us into the raw immediacy of now where fantasies can no longer survive intact. The body knows before the mind catches up. The body always knows. It knows when something shifts beneath the warmth. It knows when hope has drifted too far from reality and become something unsustainable. Disappointment is my body reclaiming itself from illusion, sediment and stones becoming visible as the water clears, the nervous system finally admitting what it sensed all along beneath the beautiful story. I recognize this terrain because my body, my very sense of identity, has walked it before.

There is something strangely clarifying about reaching this kind of groundlessness—me oh my I’m getting good at thriving on fluid foundations—because eventually the collapse exhausts itself and another awareness begins moving in underneath it, slower and wider and less concerned with my tiny empire of personal ambition. Blood continues its dark invisible river through my veins with astonishing devotion. Fungal threads pass nutrients hand to hand beneath the forest floor. Tides keep rearranging the shoreline grain by grain. Feeling disappointment is a little bell reminding me that life itself is movement, circulation, exchange, nothing fixed long enough to possess completely. Existence remains extravagantly, abundantly, in motion despite my heartbreak, and somehow this does not diminish the heartbreak itself but places it inside a larger field where grief and beauty keep making room for one another. Beneath the storyline, something older, more fractal, more relational continues moving. The body remembers it belongs to rivers and seasons and kisses and stars. Almost every atom in my heart was forged long before my name existed, which means disappointment, too, belongs to something ancient. The fruit falls. The season turns. The beloved thing changes shape. The illusion breaks. The being adapts. Disappointment returns my own little stories to the larger compost heap of Life, all this heaviness slowly warming into hot fertile dreaming.

Trust and risk emerge from the same reaching source. The moment we open toward another person, another possibility, we place something pink and fragile into uncertain hands. We keep doing it anyway, offering each other our unfinished hearts despite the overwhelming evidence that human beings will inevitably fail one another from time to time, because somewhere deep down we understand that isolation and giving up deforms us far more reliably than disappointment ever could. And while my knee-jerk reaction to the shame of disappointment is to hide, I’ve already been there done that, collapsing under the weight of a narrative no longer true. I reached the end of my own self-sufficiency in that story and now find myself believing in those standing beside me, the integrity of a caring coven, Dave sitting quietly with the part of me that feels foolish and tender and scraped raw by wanting too much from this world. The older I get, the more interested I become in remaining soft even when participation guarantees heartbreak from time to time. I do not want to become someone who only trusts what cannot wound me.

I defend disappointment because it belongs here among the rest of it, among winter and decay and failed crops and tides pulling away from shore and apples collapsing into the earth after an entire season spent reaching toward sweetness and light. I defend it because disappointment reveals how deeply we have loved, how sincerely we have hoped, how willing we were to step forward despite having no guarantees about the outcome. Every dis-appointment carries within it the possibility of a re-appointment, a strange holy opportunity to return our trust to a deeper source. Somewhere tonight another human being is sitting at the edge of their bed realizing the story they told themselves can no longer hold, and somewhere beneath that collapse, fresh water is still moving underground.

There’s a beautiful new anthology coming into the world on June 28 that I’m honored to be part of: Relative Strangers: Inheritance, Identity, and the Meaning of Kinship, from ELJ Editions, lovingly curated by . It gathers 28 voices circling the strange, tender terrain of family—what happens when someone once unknown turns out to be deeply, irrevocably yours. Stories of searching, of being found, of identities suddenly rearranging.

The essay I contributed to the anthology is titled Becoming Water. It begins with a literal convergence: my adoptive father’s ashes scattered in Lake Winnebago, traveling through rivers and locks and channels before eventually emptying into Lake Michigan, where my biological father’s bones rest beneath the water. In writing it, in living it, I’ve become the body of water too, the estuary where these two fathers and inheritances continue meeting inside me. I find myself returning again and again to the halocline, that trembling, sometimes turbulent, threshold where different waters touch without fully blending, where truth becomes its own kind of continuous motion.

Preorders are open now.

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And here’s a special one for your listening queue—my conversation on Fear Unzipped is now live. Hosted by Sandi Serling—podcast host turned new friend, someone I’m fairly certain is an angel—it lingers at the brittle edges of fear and keeps going, toward its fleshy center, where something vital and vibrant awaits. Together, we look at fear with fresh eyes, maybe not as something to clear away but an energy that unzips our conditioned layers, revealing something truer at its core. We wandered into some pretty tender places together. I’d love for you to listen.

Listen to the full podcast

And lastly, here are a few clips and photos from a full, heart-bursting weekend in NYC—Friday night celebrating with at her beautiful launch party with and Debbie Roberts, and the Empress team, authors and friends Molly Zakoor and Saturday at the conference, where I had the joy of joining three fellow memoirists with fab moderator Melisse Gelula to talk about living and writing beyond the traditional redemption arc.

And in between, so many moments that can’t be quantified—meeting fellow authors, feeling their genuine support, spending time with the publishing team, sniffing the NYC air and savoring her stench (all the more tolerable knowing I’d be back inside a grove of Doug Firs in less than 24 hours). A rare kind of trip where you realize your own journey is just one thread among many, all briefly crossing, making the whole thing feel a little more alive, a little more unforgettable.

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I used to meditate. Legs folded, altar arranged, a carved wooden Buddha, the protective ankh Brother Eric gave me to carry on solo travels. And of course, a candle.

In my early twenties, I fell into the practice like slipping into a warm body of water. A quiet homing at the start of each day, first to my thoughts, then to their loosening, then to the silence that held them. It felt easy, easier than normal life, an escape from this loud, look-at-me, world. My nervous system craved the ritual where the boundaries between body, mind, and my surroundings became soft.

And then Mal de Débarquement happened, the nonstop sloshing in my head; I have become a human wave pool. At first the flailing-armed amygdala inside those waves screamed with each crest and crash. Now she’s used to it, body surfing along the rhythms. But when I stop moving, when there is no motion at all, the waves are often still too much. I wiggle a lot. Someone once told me in those early days, “Just go within, Kim,” and I wanted to punch her in the neck. The last place I felt I could be was inside my body, inside my tormentor, inside my brain’s hokey-pokey-as-it-turns-itself-around. That’s-why-I-wanted-out.

And there is only one way out. Motion. As long as my body is moving, I am free from dizziness, not just a little, but completely. My favorite is driving. Like a golden retriever with the windows down, I am in breezy bliss, cars zipping by, hawks perched high on poles scouting their prey, but their talons have no purchase in me. I.Am.Free. The dizzies fly out the window like litter, gone before anyone can tell me to give a hoot. And while passive motion is the most effective, really, any kind of motion helps. Biking, walking, rocking back and forth, even wriggling my feet, anything that offers just enough proprioceptive feedback to drown out the drunkard in my brain.

I did try to “go within,” as suggested by my not-friend, because I would have tried anything. But the waves grew louder, larger, all-consuming. I clenched my mind around the swaying sensations, made them my mantra, my mudra, my slow dance with God, but my body kept answering back, insistent, almost pleading: move. I would step off the cushion in a ball of sweat and nerves and finally understood, this is no longer my way.

Now, I putter. Faithfully.

The kind that begins on the heels of slumber before thought organizes the day, when hands move first and the rest of me follows, a little of this, a little of that, attention drifting and landing wherever the whisper calls. I feel no urgency, no familiar shoulder tightening around outcome, just a steady, grinning motion that generates its own sense of enough.

When puttering, I become a babbling brook, wandering without ambition, wetting pebble and root and fallen leaf with easy curiosity. I become a bird bathing in the pond, her flitting both deliberate and spontaneous at once. Or a dog on his morning walk, nose low, led onward by a thousand invisible delights rising from the ground. A jazz pianist noodling, an artist doodling. Puttering meanders like small talk with a best friend, the kind that rolls out in parallel play, phrases and inside jokes drifting up then falling back into silence.

My muscles soften when inside it, breath unremarkable, posture unguarded, eyes receiving more than seeking. The world presents herself in small, specific ways and my body answers. Crumbs are gathered into my palm and brushed away, arms refold a throw from last night’s lounging, a plant is lifted, turned, its leaves thinned with a careful pinch, water poured until the soil darkens and drinks. Outside, hens cluck and scatter as I toss meal worms, eggs gathered into crook of arm, a feeder refilled, a weed loosened from the path with a small, satisfying pull. Each gesture completes itself and opens into the next. And within this continuity the morning finds its way into hands far more infinite than my own, shaping what I no longer have to hold still.

Eckhart Tolle once shared that setting aside time for meditation can keep us tethered to the very structure we hope to soften, that the act of doing it carries its own bound insistence. How funny that we need so much time and practice to finally realize there is no time (and therefore no practice), and yet here, in puttering, I recognize that release almost immediately, when practice marries life, and my body no longer has to choose between stillness and relief. The moment I stop trying to arrive somewhere else, I settle into what has always been here, an aha! that was waiting beneath the effort to reach it. In the relaxed drift of attention and response, silence gathers inward. Even with eyes open and body in motion, a quieting balloons within and around, a stillness revealed through movement.

While puttering, it’s almost as if my hands and body become their own ancient mudra. A cupped palm along the spine of Otis, fingers pressing gently into soil, hands moving through the kitchen, pulling ingredients from shelves and cupboards, rinsing, setting them out in readiness, a circular sweep of cloth across the floor as I lower myself down, knees finding the ground without ceremony, the turn of a wrist, the gentle touch to whatever is in front of me. These tasks of the morning become offerings, my body holding the poses of tending, of care. The most ancient mudras of all, long before yogis brought pinkies to thumbs, our bodies bend into the oldest shapes of caring, arms like the canopy of a tree, hands like the bowl of a tulip opening to bees, body bowed like leaves returning to the ground. These mudras arise on their own, formed in contact, the body taking on the posture of care again and again. The gesture holds, then dissolves, then returns in another form.

Puttering asks only that I stay open and present, a kind of presence that gathers deeper in the body, closer to the chest than the mind. Would I call it puttering if I didn’t care? I don’t think so. Something in it would fall flat, lose its warmth and inherent reciprocity. Puttering asks that I listen to and remain with what is here, it asks that I let relation lead. And when that guidance is followed, the same actions carry a generative pace as though tending and giving move in a circle I am already inside of; entanglement not only understood, but felt. If I’m quiet enough, I can feel the current running through it, subtle but continuous, as though each object, each surface, each small living being is participating in the same exchange. The plant leans into the water as I tend it, the dish warms inside my hands, the animal arches into touch. Even the floor takes in my slow, circular motion of cloth and shines her reply.

I think the earth putters. Today, a light breeze wanders through the yard, lifting and carrying scents of spring from one place to another. Hummingbirds whiz by, a pink pleasure here and there, squirrels trace paths up and down trees, a thousand hellos a second as life touches life. Pausing, I become the one being greeted, and then move on.

Puttering doesn’t last forever though. The moment I turn toward the computer, my attention pulls forward; fingertips curl to meet the keyboard as my body and mind snap into a fixed rhythm. A narrower awareness and pace take hold. Some would call this productivity, but when I look back at the hour that came before, I see how much has already been touched and tended. Productivity stems from the Latin producere, to bring forth, but in puttering, it’s impossible to know who is bringing whom forth, the act unfolding in many directions at once, where the isolated me loosens into a dancing we.

Putter, putter, putter. Say it under your breath. The phrase carries its own delicateness, a light humor, enunciating in my mouth an ease that bubbles just beneath the surface. And inside it, I begin to recognize a familiar quality, one that many years ago involved crossed legs, a candle, a mantra, a breath. Now, legs meander, hands reach, light kindled not through wick and match but through presence. A way of being that homes itself through relation, through the simple act of loving what is already within reach. My body continues her small, responsive shapes, held then released, a continuous unfolding of gestures that ask nothing more than to be inhabited as they arise, and occasionally, to be repeated for no reason other than they feel good in my hands. Sorry Otis, I’m not done petting you.

So this is puttering, my meditation. Next time you think to sit, set a timer, and make time to lose time, you might notice the stillness already there, always there, revealing itself when you stop trying to find it. From there, putter away, and feel your presence open, body, mind, and environment moving as one in small, shared devotions, unstudied, unoptimized, unnoticed by anyone but the ones living it.

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In Josh’s words:

You can’t treat grief with a pill. But you can treat it with a story. Last week I spoke with @Kimberly Warner, author of “Unfixed,” a memoir about family identity and chronic illness. It turns out there is no separating the two. After Kim lost her father, she took a DNA test that revealed he wasn’t her biological dad after all. But her biological father had died, too. Those revelations set a complex cascade of grief in motion. Kim was grieving the man who raised her, whom she thought of as her real father, but the DNA test upended her sense of self. And then she never had a chance to meet her biological dad. By the time she discovered that he existed at all, he was already dead. In the midst of all that stress, she began experiencing vertigo. The ground beneath her feet felt like the deck of a boat on open water. There was a name for her illness – Mal De Débarquement Syndrome – but there was no cure. Doctors are impatient with chronic illness. Because there’s no fix, there’s no chance for them to play the hero. Symptoms present physically, but they might have mental or emotional roots that no pill can touch. That’s why illness narratives matter so much. By shaping their own story, finding order in their confusion and pain, a person who suffers from chronic illness can reclaim their own identity. Instead of being the patient who “failed” to respond to treatment, they can be the storyteller who extracts meaning from suffering. I know a little about grief. Before I left academe in 2021, I lost two grandparents and a cousin. My grandfather died of natural causes in January, my grandmother died of grief in August, and my cousin had a brain hemorrhage from COVID in October. Then I left a career that I’d formerly loved. The only thing that helped during that time was storytelling. I shared memories of the people I’d lost, perhaps to convince myself that I carried them with me still. And I wrote my way through my life transition, interviewing many others about their pivots from academe to industry, trying to see where I fit in that new story. Grief breaks you in a thousand different ways. You can't put yourself back together again in quite the same shape. There’s not much medicine can do to help. But without storytelling, you might never put yourself back together at all.

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For a full-beige immersion, listen to Arvö Part’s Spiegel im Spiegel while reading this essay.

*

A team of astronomers recently reported, after surveying and then averaging light from over 200,000 galaxies, that the universe is beige. Upon their discovery, they reached out asking for suggestions for names, and some of the responses included: Cosmic Latte, Cappuccino Cosmico, Big Bang Buff, Cosmic Cream, Univeige, Cosmic Khaki, and my favorite, Primordial Clam Chowder.

If the universe is beige, I argue that hugs are beige too. Let me explain.

It is conjectured that the human brain releases large amounts of the compound N-Dimethyltryptamine (DMT) during death and dreaming. Sometimes dubbed “the spirit molecule” this alkaloid can cause intense psychedelic experiences, which might explain the imagery some experience during sleep or upon exiting this world. As a child, teetering on the sand-drift of sleep, I would sometimes experience my own Dimethyl-trip, a strange ballooning in my body always accompanied by an expansive color beige. Fawn-hued innocence filled and then pushed my physical borders out and out and out until my form held itself within an infinite border of cafe au lait. I became smooth. I became safety. I became the lasting hug that never lasts long enough. I became round and full and front-middle-and-backlit buoyancy. But just as mysteriously as it arrived, I would shape-shift into sharp and jagged, like wrinkled newspaper, both the shape and sound tearing holes into my inner landscape. I called it my “Creamy Crinkly” experience, always much preferring the cream to the crinkle. Even now, I recall her unbound expanse but remembering it in my mind is very different than feeling her swoop in and knead my existence into a cosmic loaf of bread.

It’s impossible to recreate this experience, though I have tried. She appears when she wants, and much less frequently as an adult. But I’ve found a stand-in. At least once an hour, especially after spending too much time staring at a screen (like now) and my brain begins to unravel her relationship to gravity, I kneel down and hover my face an inch away from Otis or Nova’s belly. Have you tried this with your pet? An aura of buff warmth wraps around their physical presence. Close your eyes and rest inside this border for a minute or two. Time will stretch into more as overworked nerves melt into less. Breathing slowly, I suspend in an invisible embrace. And while some may say this emanation is purely heat, I don’t feel the same honeyed magic with my face pressed against the floor vent. (I’ve tried it.)

A French word, beige means “the color of natural wool.” Not washed, bleached, or dyed, but natural wool. This makes me think of a sheep in a field; their wool isn’t white or one color, but full of heady, yet humble, hues. To create beige, one mixes equal parts: red, blue, yellow. I love that these primary, dominant notes sing loudly in any landscape, but together marry into understatements. Alone we shout Be Bold. Be unique. Be Loud. Together we whisper Be gentle. Be silent. Be.

Maitri Space Awareness practice, conceived by Tibetan meditation master Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, works with the colors blue, red, yellow, green, and white—each color represents one of the Five Wisdom Energies in Buddhism. Maitri translates as “loving kindness” or “unlimited friendliness toward self and others” and by sitting within these colors or energies, one encounters the opportunity to be with whatever arises from a ground of non-aggression. In my 120 count box of crayons this ground of non-aggression is beige, a loamy blend of all life on a continuum of emergence and decay, where calm, kindness and compassion are born not from rising above but by experiencing, digesting and marrying ourselves to what is. I’ll call it Buddha Beige.

Last week, as a practice, I carried around my imaginary Buddha Beige crayon, and whenever I experienced contraction or resistance, I colored in, or around, my experience with warm ecru. When the neighbor’s dog went missing and heaviness overwhelmed, I held my sadness in a downy nest of beige. When a grown woman embraced her dad in a coffee shop, I offered my longing beige. When the sky turned cold and shy seedlings refused life, I joined the earth’s consolation in beige.

According to design trends for 2024, beige is back. But after a quick google search, there is plenty of noise about this claim. We’ve all heard someone say beige is boring. Beige is bland. Beige is background. In our look-at-me, individualistic culture, it’s no wonder this gentle creature has been historically shooed to the corner, though I sense she’s quite happy to be there in hushed simplicity. One architect wrote, “Hogwash. Near-white is the color of non-commitment” and later described it as “death’s waiting room.” Another opinion compared beige to quiet despair and a grim communist aesthetic, claiming “Our dreams are not beige and yet! this color haunts the suburban landscape.”

I don’t know if I believe in ghosts, but I do believe in beige, and I think I’ve been delightfully haunted by it since my earliest days. We imagine spirit as a foggy apparition, or draped in cloth, clanging around the kitchen looking for spoons. But what if the presence of spirit is a color just like the universe herself? When a brain senses the unfamiliar, it makes associations, giving it shape, texture, scent; it cozies up to what it already knows. In a childhood recurring nightmare, Cookie Monster wrestled my sleeping body into his detergent-blue arms and carried me off into the night. While his lumbering shape moved me through space, I’d sleepwalk into mom and dad’s room, his dream paws releasing their grip as I cocooned on a shag rug at the foot of their bed. The wool fibers tickled my nose, their musky warmth spooned me like a big, gentle dog. When eyelids finally surrendered, a Saharan-scape of plush, beige pile hugged my darkness.

So if the universe is beige, and beige feels like a hug, then I’d like to reason the universe is one giant hug—a shag hug built from every galaxy, gas cloud, star and star seed that is you, you and you. In beige, I trust.

Beige is grandma’s soft arm

and the bones of last year’s leaf

beige is Charlie’s sepia-gaze

on a horizon never reached.


Beige is furry

beige is free

beige is Dave’s hen-egg proposal, 

Marry me?


Beige is kindness

and Arvö Part’s Spiegel im Spiegel

beige is a pause on thinking

to enter our feel. 


So when senses retreat

and this life turns her last page,

I will follow darkness out

into unblinding beige.

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The dizzy world mirrors my dizzy brain, an unnerving reunion even when Rumi told me to treat everyone as a guest, this world never still but lately even more so, liquid everything as I write this, bobbing and herky-jerking on my invisible bow. I once again say, Surrender Kim. Allow it all. And I do and then I don’t, then I do, then I don’t. And in the don’t I hear my no, and through my no an escape—

Mid-vertical, hot hindquarters aquiver, I let go.

Limbs loosed and listening for good gravity, I roll off the wild mare and crash and tumble through scratchy grass, bramble and stone tearing my skin, and I feel the bruise of saying no bloom underneath because I never want to disappoint, saying thank you to the gods by only saying yes, still learning how a no is sometimes the greatest yes of all. Sometimes survival is not holding on but learning how to fall.

And then I slow into stillness.

Solid ground, sweet, soft and cool. I no longer hear the fire horse’s thunder, only the settling of my breath, full and contained. I press my ear to darkened earth, the chitter and squish of birth and rot in slow motion, and claw myself a reverse pillow and listen to how nothing feels like everything and no movement feels like travel.

I give in and it gives to me. Everything melting toward instead of racing past.

Harnessed now to my breath, the mare fading in the distance, I feel the horizon of my own diaphragm rising and setting in its own pink fire.

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Rachel shares what it felt like to release her memoir Dizzy after years of writing fiction (“it felt like I left my diary out”), and why hearing “me too” from strangers has made the exposure worth it. Together, Kimberly and Rachel trace the brutal, invisible reality of long-term dizziness and vestibular migraine: the brain fog, the relentless appointments, the medical gaslighting, and the deep loneliness of suffering that doesn’t show up on a scan.

They also explore what illness clarified rather than simply took away—especially around self-reliance, relationships, and the slow, vulnerable practice of letting other people in. Rachel talks about the rare doctor who could read subtext, see her suffering, and keep treating her even when insurance refused to pay—restoring her faith in clinicians and in care.

Threaded through it all is Alaska: the wild, quiet vastness Rachel returned to in her mind when her nervous system was overloaded, and the way landscape can become a kind of medicine. She shares how she kept writing through the worst years—literally training herself to write with her eyes closed on yellow pads as an act of survival and escape.

Finally, Rachel describes the metabolic migraine research that helped change her life after COVID knocked her symptoms back to square one: glucose testing, continuous glucose monitoring, and a medically supervised keto-to-carb-threshold protocol that helped move many participants from chronic to episodic migraine—bringing her own symptoms down to just a few days a month.

A candid, funny, and fiercely tender conversation about illness, hope (and how it can hurt), resilience, and the surprising ways suffering can spin you—“in the most arduous of ways”—into a world of kindness.

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This episode of Unfixed: Uncut is with , the founder of Charter Book Club Adventures—aka the woman who casually slid into my DMs with an idea that was basically: “Want to do a virtual book club… and then end it on a freaking sailboat?” And yes, I immediately said: are you kidding me, YES!

We talk about Monica’s roots as a junior high teacher and coach, the kind who made books feel like doorways and classrooms feel like circles you actually want to sit in. She shares the story that lit her up as a kid (The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle), the teachers who shaped her, and the way she now designs book clubs as immersive, personal voyages—not “read chapters 1–4 and report back,” but slow down, reflect, and let the book meet your real life.

Monica walks us through her R.E.A.D. framework—Reflect, Explore, Adventure, Discover—including captain’s logs, “catching the wind” action steps, and a final-week love letter to yourself (which… yes, made me a little shivery). But why should that surprise me? Monica is an honest-to-god angel.

Also: it’s my birthday in this episode, so there’s an orange Crush cake to honor my beloved Tang—who, for the record, is thriving in his new home.

If you’ve ever wanted reading to feel more like belonging… welcome aboard.

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Friends it’s time to celebrate and I hope you will join us!

<Mary L. Tabor> ‘s remarkable novel Who By Fire will launch tomorrow, Tuesday February 24th.

I’m heading to LA to join and support her for this LIVE event and you can tune in anywhere from the globe to pop the champagne with us. We’ll begin at 6:10pm PT with a lively welcome, a reading by Mary and then I’ll join her in conversation .

Together, we’ll explore the book’s luminous terrain—fire and desire, betrayal and devotion, the stories we tell ourselves to survive love’s rupture, and the uneasy space where memory, imagination, and moral reckoning blur. Who By Fire is a novel that asks what it means to truly witness another person, and whether forgiveness is possible when the ground beneath a marriage has already burned. These questions live close to my own heart and to the terrain of Unfixed, where bodily knowing, uncertain memory, and the search for meaning after rupture shape the path forward.

Come celebrate Mary, this extraordinary book, and the fierce, tender work of telling the truth when certainty is no longer available. See you there!

WHEN: Tuesday February 24th

TIME: 6:10pm PT

WHERE: Substack LIVE

Join!

Thank you , , , , , and many others for tuning into my live video with ! Join me for my next live video in the app.

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So last January, when an orange tabby as feral as my bewilderness showed up in the coop, I did wonder: maybe he was our old matriarch Karckles, a giant orange Buff Orpington wanting to try life as a predator, golden-eyed, lithe with pounce and twenty-hour naps. But while Karckles had enjoyed a good cuddle in her aging body, it was clear this boy had never seen a human lap in his life. We would get within a hundred feet of him with the finest crunchies and he’d vanish into thin air, returning only for fast, cautious feedings before disappearing again, body low to the ground, tail tucked so completely over his giant orange balls that we couldn’t determine his gender for months.

But his tough guy act didn’t fool me. One day I saw him bounding through the front yard like a Disney character, leaping skyward for god-knows-what. I watched in disbelief, the joy of it, feeling cuteness aggression rise into my teeth. That was the day my love was reborn. We named him Tang after our late twenty-one year old tabby Pang, her tree of love branching into endlessly new possibility.

Month by painfully slow month, his one-hundred-foot boundary eventually shrank to fifty. Then to ten. Then, the slightest touch on his back while he fed. He didn’t lean in, but he didn’t resist either—hands on fur doing the ancient work of building interspecies trust. By summer, he’d scaled the old plum tree and made a bed high among the ripening fruit, draped across branches like a Bacchanalian god. From there he’d look down at us with a soft gaze, quiet, amused, a benevolent ruler surveying shared territory. Sometimes he’d scamper down the trunk to dine with company. He still rushed through his meals like each one might be his last—or his first in months—but the inverse relationship between his growing girth and our shrinking distance told the truth.

Within those widening and narrowing shapes, a kind of trust emerged that, in my fifty years, I had never experienced with a wild animal. Oh, how my heart leapt the first time my hand rested heavily on his back during feeding. No petting. Just a solid reassurance. Like the steadiness Dave once offered me while the sidewalk undulated under my feet. Hand in hand, hand on fur—sometimes the most important things are said without words.

As autumn approached, leaves falling and Tang’s tail finally rising with abandon, we began to worry about our boy. How would he survive the winter? His teenage shape was transitioning into something sturdier, but despite his obvious intelligence—any cat to survive up here longer than a year is someone special—we knew the hungry only grow hungrier as branches bare, their bony fingers licked clean come first frost.

So Dave did what any good dad would do for his boy. He built him a fort in the tractor shed. We’d already seen Tang’s golden fur on the tractor seat blanket all summer, so he moved the makeshift bed into an upper cupboard, removed its door, and turned the space into a cozy nook and patio. He set up a night camera, and within a day Tang was napping and bathing in his new home. If we’d had a graduation cap to toss, we would have.

From that moment, his trust and my joy grew in tandem. Within days we were touching him freely, hands delighting in his sturdy shape. A few days later, he was rolling onto his back, belly exposed, tempting himself with more touch. And once he got some, he couldn’t get enough. This feral nervous system—never in his short life having known affection—reached for these new sensations. But the same way I fizz and then frazzle with too much sugar, Tang would relish and then react. Blood was drawn, like some ancient, sacred bonding ritual. I longed to meet, to know, his wildness and accepted the swats like a ceremonial exchange.

Then, our front porch gargoyle began accompanying Dave on his evening walks around the property. Flashlight in hand, Tang wove in and out of Dave’s feet spelling We’re buds with his Crazy Ivan path. Nova and Otis grew accustomed to his visits too, no longer bristling but waiting calmly by the window for Cuz’n Tang to arrive. We bought him a second sleeping shelter. A heating blanket. A brush for his nappy dreads. We doubled our canned food subscription.

And then came the too-long deliberation. We asked ourselves the question again and again: What is the most loving thing to do? Should we trap him? Fix him? Would he forgive us for the shock and sudden confinement? Would indoor life feel like safety or theft? Were we protecting him, or exerting our will over a being who had made no such request? We imagined him on couches, on laps, safe from teeth and talons, but we also imagined the way he scaled trees and bounded through the world on his own terms. We tried to reason our way into the right answer, as if love were a problem to be solved rather than a force already in motion. When raccoons and other cats threatened, Tang was above fighting. He’d sit stoically on the railing until their yowling or mewing tired and they’d wander off. It felt cruel to imagine taking him from his kingdom when he so clearly reigned.

And then one day, he disappeared. I told myself he was fine. He had survived maybe a year before he’d ever found us. But beneath my cautious calm, owls and bobcats and bears loomed. One day became a week. Then another. But just as we were assuming the worst, Tang returned for a belly rub and a brief bite of food—he wasn’t even hungry—then vanished again. I was elated he was alive and heartbroken he’d left again, the two emotions pulling hard in opposite directions.

Above the toilet in my childhood home hung a Winnie-the-Pooh print, offering some version of the familiar wisdom: When you love something very, very much, let it go free. If it doesn’t come back, it was never meant to be yours. If it does, love it forever.

I never liked the saying. Even then, something about it didn’t sit right. If it doesn’t come back, you stop loving? And if it does, you’re allowed to love it forever? I didn’t have language for it yet, but love didn’t feel like something you turned off. It felt like something that kept moving, through hands and paws, through different form. I think of a down jacket I loved as a child. When I outgrew it, my mother passed it on. Years later, my aunt used that same jacket to cover a stranger injured in a car accident while they waited for help. I’ve always wondered if love moves that way too, without knowing where it’s going, or who it will warm next.

Two weeks later, I texted a small circle of homesteading friends up here, each of us feral in our own way, and asked if anyone had seen Tang. One responded: There’s a big orange tabby here. Been feeding him for several weeks. A gray one keeps trying to fight him. Poor guy’s getting beat up. I thought he was feral, but he’s as friendly as can be. I’m planning to get him neutered next week so I can bring him inside to safety. This isn’t Tang, is it?

I knew it was.

Physics shouldn’t allow collapse and expansion in the same moment, but my heart managed both. Dave and I hiked across the hill to confirm. He didn’t approach us; he just plopped down in the dirt, belly up, offering himself for rubs. A teary homecoming and a goodbye in the same beat, like the reflexive hug after words have already been said.

We’d been dumped.

A year of nurturing and patience and shared memory had carried him to a place where he could be loved by another. In Tang’s world, leaving carried no rejection. Love simply moved on, the way it always does, changing shape, finding new ways to know itself and inhabit the world. I felt it as if something had broken, but he knew it as a sign that something had worked. Love moves through. And then beyond. Like the spent hydrangea blossoms outside my window that once sang periwinkle love songs to the sky and now find new intimacy with decay. When I step out of the way, I can see the joy in how beautifully it dances through time and form and space. What Dave and I shared with Tang was not the love itself. Just the shape it took for a while. And then it took another.

I will love you for the rest of my days, Tang. I’lll always wonder if we should have acted sooner, done something differently, if you might have ended up not only nestled in my heart but curled in my lap. But it was never mine to decide.

Elizabeth shares how she once refused to look at her MRIs—“horrifying” proof of a progressive disease—until she made a radical pivot: transforming those clinical images into art, reclaiming her medical data and finding unexpected beauty in brain folds that resemble calligraphy. As MS progressed and she became quadriplegic, she adapted again, turning toward writing, speaking, and the ongoing practice of “making friends” with her body.

The conversation moves through reinvention, intimacy, and agency: how to articulate what you need when your body changes; how caregiving reshapes relationships; how swearing can be its own kind of medicine; and how aging, in a strange way, can become a homecoming—“I love getting older because I’m now normal.”

What emerges is not a neat lesson, but a lived philosophy: let it suck when it sucks, stay curious, keep redefining intimacy, and notice the people around you who make your life possible. A gathering full of grit, tenderness, laughter—and the kind of gratitude that feels like oxygen.

Thank you , , , , , and many others for tuning into my live video with !

More about Elizabeth:

Elizabeth is a vibrant illustration of grace and grit, real chutzpah, turning lump of coal into diamonds and MRI’s into works of art. In other words, she is an artist and writer exploring what it means to live in an imperfect body as part of the shared human experience.

Elizabeth Jameson’s journey with multiple sclerosis has spanned over three decades, but before being diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, she worked as a public interest lawyer, representing incarcerated children and later advocating for kids with chronic illnesses and disabilities to receive the medical care they needed.

As her own disease progressed, she began transforming her MRIs into art — reclaiming her medical data and turning those clinical images into invitations for deeper, more human conversations about illness and disability. Her work now lives in permanent collections across the U.S. and internationally, including the National Institutes of Health, major universities, and medical schools.

Due to the progression of MS, she is now quadriplegic and can no longer create visual art without assistance. She writes and speaks widely about living with illness and disability. Her essays have appeared in The New York Times, The British Medical Journal, WIRED, and MIT’s Leonardo Journal. Her piece “Losing Touch, Finding Intimacy” was also included in the New York Times anthology About Us.

She gives talks around the country — including a TEDx talk called “Learning to Celebrate and Embrace Our Imperfect Bodies” — and her new book, An Intimate Journey, comes out later this spring that chronicles the various art methods the artist has used to understand her relationship with a disease that continues to advance: textile paintings, solar plate etchings, embroideries, and digital renderings created from the clinical data that she initially refused to face. Jameson has often referred to her MRIs as containing a secret language she yearns to comprehend.

You can view her expansive, extensive art and writing collections here.

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I remember another season of my life, when I was the one underwater—dizzy, anxious, disenchanted, living in that long gray underworld where my body wouldn’t cooperate and the future felt suffocating. In that time, I would sometimes picture strangers living my opposite and whisper, Someone is getting married, someone is welcoming a baby, someone is setting out on the adventure of a lifetime. Oddly, those thoughts steadied me. It reminded me that somewhere, life was still expanding. My ragged inhale softened by the invisible exhale of millions. Some great balance I couldn’t see but needed to trust kept breathing on my behalf.

So maybe this is simply how it works. Maybe we take turns holding the light for one another on this blue dot, born into duality. Maybe one person’s small joy becomes another person’s proof that joy still exists at all.

If this season has brought me a little lift, a little wind at my back, maybe it isn’t something I own at all. Maybe it’s simply my turn to feel the current. I don’t know if it will change policy or heal national trauma. But I want to live in a world where kindness and beauty and joy are not rewards for the lucky or the strong. Where nothing about our tenderness has to be earned. Where even in the hardest moments, something in us still carries warmth and bright immensity, still finds a reason to keep going. Where each of us, at some point, gets to steady another, drawing forth what belongs to us all.

The poets always say it the best, so I’ll share one from

In These Dark Days

 
From what darkness in its center
does the amaryllis call forth
the tall green stalk, the muscular bud,
the voluptuous petals pealing back
from the center like radiant red bells?
What impossible sun shines
inside the rough-skinned bulb
to generate such lushness,
such extravagant beauty?
I want to know it, to trust it,
this bright immensity that pulses through
what is darkest in me, this life force
that cannot fit inside, that thrusts
through the desiccated skins
of my exhausted hopes to reveal itself
vulnerable and soft, vital, astonishing,
belonging to no one, alive within us all.

Which brings me to the good news.

This March, Unfixed has been selected for the Charter Book Club Adventures, a beautiful, immersive reading experience created by educator and storyteller . Monica has spent her life turning books into living, breathing journeys. After more than a decade teaching language arts and history, coaching teams, and guiding students through both stories and life, she founded Charter Book Club Adventures to create spaces where literature becomes something communal and experiential.

She designs her book club curriculums like expeditions: thoughtful, reflective, deeply human. Readers don’t just discuss a book; they travel through it together, exploring its questions, themes, and transformations side by side their own.

This March, Monica will be hosting a four-week virtual book club for Unfixed where we’ll gather in conversation and reflection, moving through the story as a crew. And for those who want to take the metaphor literally, there’s also the option to join us for an all-inclusive, in-person sailing adventure in Madeira Beach, Florida—time on the water, in community, reading and talking and letting the body remember what it feels like to drift and move with the tides.

Of all the ways to gather around a book, we end up on the water—no doubt this is Charlie nudging the plot along with a crooked grin. Sailing, of course. The element that filled his lungs and lit his spirit, and the same water that folded him back into itself. My life has always preferred its symbols a little on the nose.

Most importantly, this is an invitation. You are welcome to join!

• the virtual Unfixed book club March 2026

  -or-

• the virtual Unfixed book club March 2026 + the sailing adventure March 20-22

In a chapter when so much feels fractured, the simple act of reading together feels like a necessary mending. A small circle of steadiness. A shared lantern. Proof that even now, we can gather, learn, celebrate, and hold and home one another in our stories. If this sounds like the harbor you need, I’d love to see you there.

JOIN THE UNFIXED BOOK CLUB CREW

Purchase Unfixed

It also weaves in lines from the ecstatic poem Windhover, by Gerard Manley Hopkins. I highly recommend reading it in full when you’re finished here.

You dip one toe into the water and immediately regret it. You always do. Cold as a reprimand, cold as a dare, slapping your skin like a sentence unfinished. Thoughts of your day are frozen mid-syllable. You hover longer than you need to, sucking air through your teeth, telling yourself you don’t have to do this, no one is watching. But you are. The road can’t see you, but the sun can; mid-winter sun, the kind that pretends to give warmth from a sideways glance.

Then something in you overrides something else; it always does. You step in. Left foot first, then right, the same order every time, superstition a thin blanket on your naked skin. Slowly, you’re in no hurry, the creek couldn’t get any colder. The sky mirrors its ice, nothing warm between it and the water except your own beating heart and he’s about to question your sanity. The water climbs your calves, your knees, your thighs, and by the time it reaches your waist, breath goes strange, shallow, animal. Tiny knives everywhere at once, your skin recoils and your mind bargains, but you don’t listen.

You lower yourself until the water closes around your ribs, your chest, your shoulders. When it reaches your neck, your ego collapses to meet its certain death while deep, cellular warmth pushes forward. The evergreen tree line conspires, so you stay. In a heap nearby your clothes lie—shed skin, nearly worn through but a lifetime yet to live. The breeze moves across your back waking hairs, and you think, as you often do at this moment: How long can this continue? How long can I?

    Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!
     
   No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
    Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.

You’ve been carrying Hopkins’ lines with you again, turning them over the way you turn stones in your pocket. You don’t recite the whole thing, just pieces that remind your heart of the fire that breaks from thee. Fragments, sounds, rhythms to rev your own beat. You feel your life force falling with the falcon, the sheer force of hurl and gliding scraping you raw for renewal. You know this feeling, the lift, the fight, when wind meets mastery’s sail and tests it. But how much abrasion can you take? Gall. Such an ugly word.

The water hurts less now, or maybe you’ve slipped past the part that needs to name or claim the pain. Heat moves inside you, slow but urgent, your cells striking flint against themselves. This warmth isn’t coming from the world, it comes from somewhere older, some place where resistance and pressure demand transformation. Off-season, when most boats are pulled from the lake until safer, smoother days, you sail away.

High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,

You think of how you built the house without plumbing on purpose, how everyone thought it was stubbornness or nostalgia or some half-baked philosophy. You never knew how to explain it, and you still don’t, you only know that when ease arrives too quickly, something dulls, that when life stops rubbing up against you, you disappear from yourself.

You sit until the tree line shares its poem; each limb a stanza, each reach a perfect echo of your own silence. Finally, you can hear it clearly. The branches don’t apologize for their angles, how they stretch and twist and make homes for birds without ever asking if they’re doing it right. They don’t ask you if you’re doing it right, and on a quiet bow-bend your wimpling wing alights.

When you finally stand, the cold bites again, sharper this time, as if offended you thought the worst was over. You wrap a towel around your body and laugh a short bark of disbelief. Still alive. Still here. Still uninvited: Is it time for a change? You’ve been asking it too much lately.

    Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird, – the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!

Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here

Buckle!

In town, under fluorescent lights, your heart retreats. You stand in line holding pipes and valves, fittings for a future you don't want. Later, trenching through clay, hands blistered, shoulders aching, you call it the responsible thing. A house sealed in should’s: roof and walls and amenity should rebuff outdoor extremity; water should arrive without effort; a man should answer to more than the weather.

When the plumbing is finally finished, the house feels different, armored. Rushing creek now trickles through walls, broken into lines too short to matter. You turn on the tap and listen to the poem that has forgotten its body: water speaking evenly, saying only what it means to say, thin, didactic, complete. You watch the flow and feel more than water running down the drain. So that night, you leave the lights off. When thirst comes, you go outside instead, drink under the open sky as the cold dares you again into regret, until its blue-bleak skin gashes open your own gold-vermillion.

From that day on, you wash in the creek anyway. A private, proud, correction.

Lines from Gerard Manley Hopkins’ “The Windhover.” Haven’t read it? You must.

Happy New Year, friends,

Whether you’re beginning the year imagining how you might fill a fresh calendar, or sitting quietly with the spaces between those dreams, I hope you cup those glowing embers and blow on them gently—holding intention, willfulness, and exhale in careful balance.

I’ll be doing the same: some days already marked in ink, others held in sacred spaciousness. It’s easy for our days to fill with to-do’s and tasks without noticing how constantly our inner lives are in receiving mode, taking in more than we ever metabolize. This year, I’m committing to kinder boundaries around that input—commuting, cooking, exercising in silence; protecting early mornings and evenings from digital communication; nurturing the analog; turning off even more notifications; trusting there is enough time to get it all done and still make room for an expansive exhale. Breathed gently, that exhale is what keeps the embers of your dreams alive, giving them enough air to glow, and, in time, to become fire.

From that openness, I’m looking forward to the mores that come from less: more reflecting and writing, more silent walks among moss-heavy trees, more stillness, more listening. More allowing what’s already alive to breathe. More attention to the non-human memoirs composing themselves all around me, their leafing arcs occasionally joining mine, if I’m lucky.

And speaking of memoir, Unfixed continues to reach hands and hearts far and wide. I’m still not quite sure how it’s possible, this babe of mine now with a life all her own, but I’m sitting back in gratitude, watching her blossom in this strange world. May the love and encouragement you’ve breathed into my journey return to you multiplied in the year ahead, for yourselves, and for all beings.

Here are some Unfixed happenings, past and future. In the spirit of more spaciousness, don’t indulge in all of them. Pick one, and trust it carries the message you need most.

LISTEN, READ, WATCH or JOIN

• For those who missed my conversation on The Rise Podcast with the luminous Sara Connell, you’re in for a treat. Sara’s good energy could power the solar system; I consider meeting her on my book tour one of my most fortunate moments of 2025. Tune in!

  

• In December, I spent a lovely thirty minutes with CBS anchor/reporter Emily Burris on KOIN Conversations discussing the Unfixed, the documentary work preceding the memoir release, and how we can feel gutted and sucky while at the same time know we’re on the right path.

• Read the feature story in Oregon Arts Watch, that ended with this doozy of a quote: “Grief to grief. Wonder to wonder. Journeys of the heart, seekings of the soul: Unfixed is what comes when a poet writes a book.” Thank you !

  

• An interview with 1859 Magazine will hit the shelves January 2026.

  

• Shelves Bookstore selected Unfixed as one of their Reading is a Lifestyle Book Picks and I’ll be joining the group on 1/11 at 3pm PT. To learn more about their book-loving community, subscription service, or to join our conversation, visit this link.

  

• Unfixed is the I AM ALS Book Club January book club pick. If you’d like to join on 1/15 at 6pm PT, register here.

  

• DNA Surprises Podcast will air my conversation with host Alexis Hourselt on January 20th. Hands down, one of my favorite chats to date. Alexis’s genuine, empathic curiosity created a space where entirely new questions could emerge, questions I’d never been asked before.

  

• For Colorado residents, I’ll be at the Boulder Bookstore on January 20th at 6:30pm in conversation with Stanford board director Jane McConnell. Get your tickets today!

  

• At last! Writing the Unfixed Life begins February 2nd from 9:15-10:30pm PT. For four consecutive Mondays, I will be sharing creative space with an intimate circle of writers, new and seasoned, identifying the central ecosystem of our stories and befriending uncertainty as a catalyzing element in the telling and shaping of them. There’s room for one or two more participants. I’d love to share this space with you. Learn more.

  

• I will be speaking in-person at the Woodstock Book Festival next April so anyone nearby, mark your calendars! April 9-12, 2026.

  

• I was also invited to share in-person at the Open Secrets LIVE storytelling event in NYC on May 2, 2026. New Yorkers, I’d love it if you joined us!

  

• Next October 4 - 7 I’ll be teaching a 3-day seminar Beyond Resolution: Stories of the Unfixable at the picturesque Bjorklunden, Lawrence University’s North Campus.

  

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I never wished for my own children. Stuffed animals were my first loves, rotated nightly with the precision of a tiny diplomat ignoring favoritism. Then came Kassandra, my Cabbage Patch doll, cuddled long after other girls had dropped theirs for boys. She’s still here, asleep in a storage bin, waiting. I can’t bring myself to let her go.

But when real babies entered the room, my arms stiffened. I didn’t grow up around diapers or the siren cries of need, so when I took my first babysitting job and changed my first diaper, the sweet-pea rot hit me like a fist. I ran from the room gagging. Later, as high-school friends confessed their someday-longings—cradling velvet heads, counting toes like tiny abacuses—I felt nothing. I waited for the wanting to arrive, the way books and songs and movies promised it would. It never did. Which one were you, I wonder? Their yearning bloomed like inevitable spring, but never formed a bud in me.

What did form was an insatiable ache to make. I called it “to be in the pulse of creation,” whatever that meant. When I danced, when I built miniature worlds, when color and shape and music and motion collided, I felt free. I felt home. I felt me. The desire burned—sometimes so hot I’d shake afterward, hungry and hollowed by the fire of invention—and in that burning, I became a different kind of vessel, a space that could take in the world and ring it back amplified or transformed. Not a cradle for one heartbeat, but a bowl resonating with, and listening for, the many.

But I noticed a shift five years ago, awakened in the night by a phantom infant curled into me, both of us returned to our most original shape. Born as circles, we stretch into lines, then soften back into circles. Her round shadow stayed on my chest all day, all week, until I finally acted on it. Calling the maternity ward at OHSU, I asked to volunteer, to hold newborns newly arrived from their primordial soup, bound together by human touch. I filled out the application that night, already imagining the softening: mystery resting against a stillness I was only beginning to trust myself. My stillness lives inside movement, a vertigo that rocks me even on solid ground, teaching me the body doesn’t have to choose. Motion and calm can share the same space; chaos can cradle quiet. What once felt like dissonance is becoming harmony. And I wanted to give that to them, that lingering note—the one that stays even after the music ends—so that later, in their own hard chapters, it might return. A reminder that a body can tremble and still be safe.

Many had arrived at this vision before me. The waitlist stretched more than a year, with other menial tasks required first. So the imagining would have to be enough. And perhaps it was—an initiation without contact, the mallet never touching the bowl, but intention still vibrating in the space between.

In early December, I drove to another holiday event just after dawn. Out here, everywhere is an hour away, but I don’t mind. Commuting is the yawning pause modern life has muzzled. Sometimes Conan. Sometimes silence. Sometimes Mom. Fog hung low on the highway. Traffic slowed. And I thought of Mom’s slowing—how Parkinson’s alters her pacing, the way a singing bowl’s tone deepens as the mallet circles slower, closer to the heart. We’re listening now for meaning beneath her messages, the vibration beneath her voice.

She tells me she has not read my memoir once, but three times now, each reading revealing rooms inside rooms. She tells me she’s proud. That the book changed her. And I try to let that in without deflecting. Though the truest deflection is this: You wrote this too, Mom. You midwifed every word through your own resonance. Her birthing me into the world was merely the first strike of the mallet. Everything since has been reverberation.

She takes it in. We fall into quiet. Microscopic droplets on the windshield form a kind of braille our souls try to read. Some frequencies are too subtle for ears.

Then, like a clearing in the cloudbank, she says, “Kim, your book gave birth to me.”

The words press between us. Something in my chest opens before my mind can catch up.

I repeat it back, certain I misheard, even as my spine erupts in knowing. “Yes,” she says again. “Your book gave birth to me.”

Mother begets daughter who begets book that begets mother again. A matrilineal ouroboros; stories of birth and rebirth traveling in circles as if my memoir bent time, collapsing past and future into a single point of return. I whisper her words again and my womb hums with presence. Maybe it always has.

A singing bowl is only useful because it’s hollow. Empty isn’t silent. Empty is ready. It receives the strike—a mallet, a palm, a note, a story—and gives it back rounder, fuller, transformed. Some wombs swell with bodies. Some swell once, then quiet, and open again to other forms of creation. Mine, maybe yours too, takes in what the world offers, holds it, circles, lets it hum until something new is born from the listening itself.

Emptiness is what allows the song, a creativity born through relation. To resonate is its own way of mothering.

Hold Unfixed in your hands