Unfixed Podcast

Kimberly Warner

Unfixed: The Podcast What if the very thing that unmoored you became the thread that held you together? Unfixed is a podcast about living—and learning to love—the 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 presence—not perfection—makes 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 forms—grief, 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: Uncut—shorter, spontaneous conversations recorded live. In just 30 minutes, guests respond to one central inquiry: What's something in your life that's come undone—and 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. unfixed.substack.com

  1. You Might Also Like: On Purpose with Jay Shetty

    1D AGO ·  BONUS

    You Might Also Like: On Purpose with Jay Shetty

    Introducing 10 Books That Changed My Life from On Purpose with Jay Shetty. Follow the show: On Purpose with Jay Shetty Today, Jay opens with an honest observation: most books don’t actually change your life. While many offer inspiration in the moment, they rarely shift how we truly think or live. What makes the difference, Jay explains, isn’t how much you read, it’s whether a single idea stays with you long enough to reshape your decisions, habits, and identity. Jay shares 10 books that genuinely changed his life, and the specific lessons that stayed with him long after he turned the last page. From rethinking how we judge our decisions to letting go of the need for approval, each book challenged a belief he once held. Jay explores how we often misinterpret our experiences, chase a single definition of purpose, and overwhelm our minds with unnecessary mental clutter. He also unpacks the hidden patterns that drive so much of our stress, like the illusion of certainty in our thinking and the instinct to defend our beliefs instead of questioning them. Through these insights, Jay invites you to look at your own thinking more closely, and to become more intentional about how you make decisions, what you believe, and how you show up every day. In this episode, you'll learn: How to Clear Mental Clutter and Think Better How to Question Your Own Thinking How to Take Action Without Perfection How to Understand People You Disagree With How to Focus on Effort, Not Results You are allowed to grow at your own pace. You are allowed to not have everything figured out. What matters is that you keep showing up with intention, with awareness, and with the courage to do things differently, even when it feels uncomfortable. With Love and Gratitude, Jay Shetty JAY’S DAILY WISDOM DELIVERED STRAIGHT TO YOUR INBOX Join 900,000+ readers discovering how small daily shifts create big life change with my free newsletter. Subscribe here: https://news.jayshetty.me/subscribe  Check out our Apple subscription to unlock bonus content of On Purpose! https://lnk.to/JayShettyPodcast  What We Discuss: 00:00 Intro 01:46 Book 1: How to Decide: Why We Judge Decisions the Wrong Way 04:49 Book 2: Finding Your Element (The Myth of One True Purpose) 07:07 Book 3: An Organized Mind 09:48 Book 4: The Courage To Be Disliked 13:28 Book 5: Thinking, Fast and Slow 16:36 Book 6: Flow State  18:50 Book 7: The Lean Startup - Stop Overthinking, Start Testing 21:33 Book 8: The Righteous Mind 24:50 Book 9: Lessons From the Bhagavad Gita 27:04 Book 10: Breath: A Simple Way to Reset Your State See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. DISCLAIMER: Please note, this is an independent podcast episode not affiliated with, endorsed by, or produced in conjunction with the host podcast feed or any of its media entities. The views and opinions expressed in this episode are solely those of the creators and guests. For any concerns, please reach out to team@podroll.fm.

  2. Live with Joshua Doležal and Kimberly Warner

    MAR 31

    Live with Joshua Doležal and Kimberly Warner

    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

    50 min
  3. LIVE! Unfixed: Uncut with acclaimed author Rachel Weaver

    MAR 3

    LIVE! Unfixed: Uncut with acclaimed author Rachel Weaver

    In this episode, Kimberly Warner sits down with novelist-turned-memoirist Rachel Weaver to talk about what it really means to live inside a body that won’t cooperate—and how you keep building a life anyway. 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. Thank you Francesca Bossert, Kaylene Johnson-Sullivan, Lor, and many others for tuning into my live video with Rachel Weaver! Join me for my next live video in the app. Get full access to Unfixed at unfixed.substack.com/subscribe

    54 min
  4. LIVE! Unfixed: Uncut with Monica Ticknor

    FEB 26

    LIVE! Unfixed: Uncut with Monica Ticknor

    A tiny Wi-Fi glitch tried to take us out at the start… but we left it unfixed (obviously) and rolled right into one of the sweetest, funniest conversations. This episode of Unfixed: Uncut is with Monica Ticknor , 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. Get full access to Unfixed at unfixed.substack.com/subscribe

    48 min
4.9
out of 5
53 Ratings

About

Unfixed: The Podcast What if the very thing that unmoored you became the thread that held you together? Unfixed is a podcast about living—and learning to love—the 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 presence—not perfection—makes 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 forms—grief, 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: Uncut—shorter, spontaneous conversations recorded live. In just 30 minutes, guests respond to one central inquiry: What's something in your life that's come undone—and 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. unfixed.substack.com

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