 |
Unfixed PodcastAuthor: Unfixed
Unfixed: The Podcast What if the very thing that unmoored you became the thread that held you together? Unfixed is a podcast about livingand learning to lovethe question. In each season, we explore the unpredictable terrain of adversity, creativity, and transformation through intimate, unguarded conversations with people who are reshaping their lives in the wake of what they didn't choose. Season One pairs individuals living with chronic illness or disability with artists, clinicians, and thinkers who bring their own experience of challenge to the table. These duets are invitations to listen with curiosity and compassion, revealing how presencenot perfectionmakes a life powerful. Season Two ventures into the literary world of Substack, where Kimberly Warner speaks with writers whose fiction, memoir, and essays illuminate the "unfixed" condition in its many formsgrief, gender, aging, family rupture, economic uncertainty, and environmental collapse. Together, they unearth the wisdom hidden inside complexity and remind us that the mess is often the message. Season Three introduces Unfixed: Uncutshorter, spontaneous conversations recorded live. In just 30 minutes, guests respond to one central inquiry: What's something in your life that's come undoneand how might it be exactly what you needed? Whether chronic illness or heartbreak, identity or ecological grief, each episode is a practice in staying open, in finding meaning without resolution. Because sometimes, the very thing we fear is the thing that saves us. Language: en Genres: Education, Philosophy, Self-Improvement, Society & Culture Contact email: Get it Feed URL: Get it iTunes ID: Get it |
Listen Now...
Live with Joshua Doležal and Kimberly Warner
Tuesday, 31 March, 2026
This conversation is going to stay with me for a long time. Together, Josh and I walked the fine threshold between grief and storytelling, illness and healing, and I found myself feeling lighter and more stable when we finished. 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.Thank you j.e. moyer, LPC, Sean Talbeaux, Lor, and many others for tuning into my live video with Joshua Doležal! Join me for my next live video in the app. Get full access to Unfixed at unfixed.substack.com/subscribe
