The mystery of it continues, which is part in due to the
relationships that have developed from this with the
family, a lot of it to do with this book out in the world and
the conversations that are coming from that.
I didn't know how many people needed to hear that it's OK to
be unfixed. I thought it was the message
that I really needed and it started to resonate with me.
But I think the world is ready to let their sales down and just
meet life as it is. We've been fed so much messaging
around how to improve and self actualize and all of the growth
is, I'm not dismissing that, but I think it's just been very out
of balance with the meeting life as it is.
Welcome to DNA Surprises, a podcast that explores the life
altering world of unexpected DNA discoveries.
I'm your host, Alexis Ourselt. This show centers the stories of
people who've experienced NP, ES or non paternal events.
In other words, people who've learned that their biological
father isn't who they thought he was.
We'll also hear from adoptees, donor conceived people, and the
families navigating these discoveries.
Get ready to follow the incredible journeys that begin
with a simple DNA test. This is DNA surprises.
Hosting DNA Surprises gives me the incredible opportunity to
speak to incredible people every week, and almost everyone I
speak to says something along the lines of I've been told to
write a book. It's true, our stories are
stranger than fiction. In this week's episode, I'm
joined by someone who wrote that book, Kimberly Warner, author of
Unfixed, a memoir of family mystery and the currents that
carry you home. Her story details her perfect
from the outside, but far from it on the inside.
Family loss, illness, relationships, careers, and
more. But as we discuss, it's anchored
on the revelation that the man who raised her is not her
biological father. I really enjoyed this
conversation and hope you do too.
Thank you for sharing your story, Kimberly.
Today I am joined by Kimberly Warner, author of the incredible
memoir Unfixed, a memoir of family, mystery, and the
currents that carry you Home. Thank you so much for joining
me, Kimberly. Oh, it's a pleasure to be here,
Alexis. Finally.
Yes, finally. We've been trying to make this
interview happen for a while and now we're sitting down getting
to talk about it. I just finished the memoir and,
and really enjoyed it. Thank you for telling your story
so so generously and and vulnerably.
Well, I needed to tell it, you know, I, I don't know if I don't
think this was even in the preface, but I wrote this for
myself. I truly decided in 2018 that I
needed to get this down on paper because so much had happened, so
much had changed. My identity was completely just
in disarray, and so for me it was about reclaiming parts of
myself and a kind of reckoning and a survival strategy.
So all of that was really, really necessary.
Didn't think it would ever be published and put into the
world. Well, I'm so glad that it was.
Obviously, if you're listening to this podcast, you can
probably guess that one of the major themes of Kimberly's book
is a DNA surprise. So before we jump in and start
talking more deeply about the book, I'd love if you could
share with the listeners kind of an overview of of what happened.
What was your DNA surprise? Gosh, yes.
And it is, it's a, it's a long story.
So I'm going to try to abbreviate it here.
As with all of us, we have, you know, there's so many layers to
these stories. When I was 17, I was told that
my father might not be my father, but it was told in a
very casual, pedestrian kind of way on a walk with my mother.
And I was a teenager. I was self absorbed in my own
life. I was very, very close to my
dad. And it really was like presented
to me as a 1% possibility. So I dismissed it, so much so
that I forgot about it, never talked to my dad about it, never
talked to friends about it. It was gone, done.
My dad that raised me died six months later, and that only
further buried this conversation, so it was not part
of me. Fast forward when I turned 40
and in this interim, my mom would sometimes bring up that
story, this one night fling with the man in the Mariposa Music
Festival in Canada. And you know, she would talk
about Charlie, but it was just Charlie and this fun little
thing. So there was nothing more to it
except a family joke at that point.
However, when I turned 40, I had a very severe bicycle accident.
I had a long period of bed rest and in that same week that the
bicycle accident happened, my mother about a month prior
remembered his last name and this again was on a random walk.
We were happened to be in Mexico at that time and never in my
life had she said Charles Browser.
She had only ever said the first name and mentioned a few details
so this was enough for me here. This man keeps coming up.
I better just do a little Google search now.
I put Charles browser. I knew that he had a television
show on public television. I knew that he was a musician.
Enough details. Up pops an image that shatters
something inside of me. Even when I looked at it, I saw
it. And I was on the plane ride home
from that trip in Mexico and I already was starting to tremble
inside. I pulled the image up without
any context and shared it with my husband when he picked me up
at the airport. And I said, who does that look
like? And he just sort of laughed.
And he said, I don't, I don't know, but it could be your dad.
And that was another piece for me to kind of digest.
Bicycle accident happened. Lots of time in bed rest to
digest even more. Finally my brother gifted me
Adna kit and I took the DNA test and found out that he was my
half brother. So of course there's, you know,
a lot more to the story. And of course people are
thinking, well, what about other men?
How did you know you know it was him?
And but I won't reveal all of that right now.
But yes, that was sort of how it began and my life just crumbled
at that point. And I will say, even as I'm
listening to you tell this, I'm like, oh, and then this
happened, you know, thinking more about all of the details
and the, and the circumstances and the way you talk about your,
your dad dying so soon after that.
And it, I really just felt like I was there with you and, and
throughout so much of the memoir as well.
So thank you for sharing that. And, and we won't go too deep
into spoilers during this conversation for sure, but I do
have questions about the book, Maybe just starting with, with
the title Unfixed. I think that that term, while
it's not anything I think I had used to describe, I think I'd
used Untethered, unmoored. But unfixed also really
resonates. What does that word mean to you?
For me, the original term came from one of the elements that
came from the discovery of this DNA test and the unraveling,
which included the unraveling of my own neurology.
So I ended up developing A neurological disorder that comes
from heightened states of panic. So when I say I unraveled, I I
went into some protracted panic attacks and so much it's
destabilized my nervous system so much so that my brain started
misinterpreting solid ground as liquid.
It's called Malde debarkment syndrome and it's something that
I live with now 24/7. But for the first, I want to say
I always forget, but it was like 6 years before I even had a
diagnosis. I was chasing, chasing, chasing,
trying to fix it. I had no room in my entire being
for living with this. This was not something I could
live with and so much so that I felt like I did need to die if
this was going to stay with me. It was so tormenting.
I went from being a tomboy to doing everything and running a
film company and all of that to not being able to walk across
the street without clutching my husband's hand.
And so I'm very much isolated. And so the word fixed was was
driving the this compulsion. And then became a conversation
that my husband and I had around what would it be like if you
were not fixed? What if you were unfixed?
So it started there and my exploration of a whole community
of humans that live with chronic illness and and mental illness
and things that we cannot control and cannot fix.
But it's become so much more of a philosophy now, which is not
something that is exclusive to the unfixed community of chronic
illness. It's something we all live with.
It's it's grief, it's uncertainty, it's inefficiency,
it's not knowing. It's all of the things that we
want to to, you know, with our new age self help books, we want
to control and, and I had to by necessity, learn to find another
way of transformation that wasn't through curing.
It was a transformation through surrender.
Oh, that's such a good way of describing it.
We don't have to be fixed. We don't have to be fixed.
I like unfixed. Yeah.
Exactly. We're not broken, we're unfixed.
And even, you know, we think about like our fixed ideas.
And it really it has, it has so many different layers of
meaning. But I love also that it can be
part of the fluidity of how we how we navigate the world with
our belief systems. And I, my own sense of self has
changed through the discovery of this DNA test and, and through
the living with the neurological disorder.
So even my identity is unfixed. Absolutely.
Well, this is actually maybe a good segue for the for the first
excerpt that I'd love for you to read.
It's this idea of from the outside, many people probably
and did assume that you had this perfect family and this perfect
life. Your father was a doctor, you
know, two kids like it's just all looked idyllic.
But you and your family struggled with with many
different things. But you personally write about
struggling with OCD, anxiety and this feeling of discomfort
within your own body. And as I mentioned when we were
talking earlier, it reminded me of of Kerry Washington's book.
And she was a late discovery donor conceived person.
So she had her own DNA surprise in her life and and she also had
these just not feeling comfortable with herself and not
really knowing what was wrong. And and you talked about this,
this mystery illness that you've had.
So, you know, there's also that piece that's that's an
undercurrent throughout. But I was really struck by that
feeling that a lot of us seem to have, that just feeling like
something's wrong, not necessarily attributing it
really to anything with our families, but it's almost like
there's something wrong with us. So I would love if you could
read an excerpt from Chapter 7 that really captures that.
I I'm so there with you, Alexis. It's like what Danny Shapiro
calls the unknown known. And our body knows when our mind
doesn't. And so this manifests in unusual
ways. I ground myself with routine,
structure, and predictability. Mom is thoughtful about our
activities, maintaining our calendar even through the more
tumultuous stretches of her marriage.
She may need the predictability as much as I do.
Holiday rituals, Meal rituals. Kim Robertson's calming heart.
Music in the morning rituals. The structure soothes my nervous
system, but the confidence with which it's executed sedates me.
I fall in line. Who am I to question these three
gorgeous, intelligent, successful humans and the way
they move so assuredly through the world?
I don't have the language or the confidence to explore my own own
unmasked, unanswered questions. Ask me if something is wrong and
I feel a guilty feeling like shit when I have so much
privilege. B Confused by the disconnect
between how I feel and how I am perceived.
Or C Grumpy and embarrassed when you notice that I feel like shit
and D sad when you don't notice that I feel like shit.
And this is when I take it out on myself, on my skin.
I spend hundreds of hours hidden in the bathroom punishing
myself, excavating anxiety 1 pore at a time.
Blood and sebum surface like proof.
I don't understand the source of my unease, so I create 1
instead. The root of my anxiety must be
my skin. Why would I think otherwise?
There is nothing in the outward facing architecture of my life
that explains why I feel like an outsider, so lonely, so deeply
insecure. So I latch onto the one thing I
can see. If only these pimples go away,
then I'll be happy again. Do you think, and it's hard
right to look back because hindsight is 2020, but were you
aware at that time that you felt like you didn't fit in with your
family and and that was why you were doing what you were doing?
Or is it more upon reflection you go aha that that created
some anxiety just with that lack of belonging?
I think it's, it's hindsight is 2020 for me.
I, I definitely knew that I felt anxious, but I'd had, I had no
clue where to put it. And so I just, I, I fixated it
was my skin. I decided that's what made me
feel so anxious. And then when that cleared up, I
turned it into something else and then into something else.
So without the context of the paternity issue, I really didn't
have ground to stand on. So I had to fabricate what that
was. And I think also that there is
sort of, you know, the inflammatory nature of anxiety
and of not feeling like you belong, that that can
biologically live in our bodies as inflammation.
It's it's like a, a heat to fire.
It's something that can't be released.
And so I in a way, I was trying to surface it.
I was trying to find it and over and over and over again, as you
know, on the book, I was trying to find it, but it just didn't
have anywhere to land because there was no story.
There was no narrative that could hold it.
I love the way that you've described that and what you said
about your anxiety moving from thing to thing to thing.
I have described that so many times in therapy.
Actually. My husband is the one who who
pointed it out to me. It took me that long to realize
that that's what I was doing where he was like, Do you notice
that, You know, it might start out with our kitchen's really
messy and I need to reorganize everything.
And then once that's done, there's some other problem that
needs to be solved. This was before my DNA surprise
as well so. I wonder if that's a pattern for
a lot of us, because without the narrative to hold that tension
it it needs a place to go. It does.
Again, we're not going to go deep into spoilers, but you do
end up discovering Charlie and learning more about him and and
you're not able to meet him. But one of the things that you
do throughout the book is write these letters.
And I think many people do the practice of, of writing letters
to our, to ourselves, to our mothers, to our fathers to try
to process. But something that I thought was
really interesting is that you wrote to him not from present
day. You wrote to him from the
perspective of your younger self in these various moments.
Can you talk about why you did that and what that did for you
as you processed your DNA? Surprise, Yeah.
That was a really playful, fun way for me to get to know him
and know myself in relationship to him through all the chapters
of my life that didn't get to sit on his lap while he was
playing his guitar or go for walks with him in the woods or
cry in his arm. You know, fantasies.
These are fantasies that I don't know if these would have
happened. So much of what I discovered
when I discovered Charlie eventually was a part of myself
that had been hidden. And not just, you know, like
what my nose looked like, but my creativity.
I dropped out of medical school and pursued film.
And Charlie, I learned, was a poet, A musician, A filmmaker.
He was involved in so many different facets of what I had
been restlessly kind of confused by because I came from a very
self help new agey natural medicine and all of that.
So my left turn towards all these things that felt so true
to me were also very confusing. So when I finally learned about
Charlie and his family and this whole creative universe that
they embodied, it was like something like little lights
went on in my DNA. It felt like almost as if like,
oh, I can finally come to life. And so one of the things I did
was I would take his poetry and answer the poems as if we were
doing like a call and response. And then that led into these
writing letters to him. That felt like it was not just
communicating with him in my imagination, but also letting
that part of myself that was still very infantile come to
life. Because through that
relationship, through that imaginary conversation, it was
as if I was starting to acknowledge that those other
parts of me existed. So it really kind of was a
little bit like a regenerative process of, of bringing all
those hidden parts of myself to the surface.
Oh, I love that. Something we've talked about and
I've hosted retreats and we've had sessions on parts work and I
think that is such an interesting exercise to just
think about putting yourself in that place and writing.
Thank you for talking about it because I thought that that was
like an interesting sort of writing exercise that maybe the
listeners would want to try or I may try that I.
Highly encourage it. And I even, I mean, I see photos
of my biological father when he was young.
We're identical, we're identical.
And I can see my little bratty, snotty face and his bratty,
snotty like, you know, like, and it's like, Oh, I want to have a
conversation from that little girl who was trying to
understand the world and talk like, how did he navigate that?
And it just it's very satisfying because I really do believe our
ancestors live in us. They die, but they they live in
us in so many different ways. And so we have these
opportunities to kind of bring bring them to life.
Again, Yeah, absolutely. Now, you, you talked about
finding out about Charlie, maybe not all the details, but just
the the idea that he he was a possibility when you were 17 and
in 1992. And that was before consumer DNA
tests and the Internet were prominent.
How do you think that this impacted your story?
Something I'm really fascinated by when I talk to other people
who've had DNA surprises is this waiting game and how long it
takes for these stories to play out.
Well, I remember somewhere around like when I had my first
computer or, and you know, Google was still something that
was not used a lot, but I was like, oh, I'm able to use this
search engine. And I, I remember putting that
name in again, Charlie. And there was, like I said,
there was no last name, but I knew a little bit about like
this TV show and whatever, and it just always would, it brought
up this German musician from like 1922 or something.
But it did feel sometimes like I was in this divination process
with the computer, Like something in me kept me coming
back, but there was nothing, nothing ever emerged.
So it was just dead. I still have a lot of anxiety
and I was still demonstrating a lot of behaviors that were
manifestations of this anxiety and I had a lot of health
problems. When I was 21, I developed
Graves' disease, which is an autoimmune thyroid disorder.
And and I even remember reading somewhere that that type of
disorder with the thyroid is a manifestation of grief.
Whether or not that's true, this was just a few years after my
dad had died. So I spent 2 decades of my adult
life very much floundering and, and dabbling and clinging to
doctors, really chasing a fix of for, you know, my thyroid and
then my gut and then what? It was always something.
So I felt like I was, I don't want to say I wasted my life
because all of this led to this incredible story that I live now
that I feel so have so much agency and empowerment and but
there but I was lost. I felt very, very, very lost for
those 20 years. Pursuit of my career kept
changing. My relationships with my mother
and my brother were, you know, all over the place.
My relationships with men were all over the place.
I look back and I feel sad for that girl.
You know, I really wish I could have held her and told her that
the feelings that she was having inside were true and that
they're, they had a place and they had a narrative that they
could land in and, and that she didn't need to blame herself for
feeling so, so strange. I just felt so lost and so
strange in this world, like I didn't belong.
And I, I really wish I could go back and tell her that she did
belong and that soon she would know.
She would know. Yeah, yeah.
Maybe you weren't even aware of how patient you were being
because you didn't know what what was in front of you.
But it's just an incredibly long time to wait, you know, to get
those answers. Yeah, and it's hard on our
bodies. I mean, I keep coming back to
our body, but I really do think these truths live in our bodies.
And I would maybe there's been a pull, but I would guess that a
lot of us that live through these stories, especially with
that long duration, we end up with some kind of chronic
disorder where there's that schism between what we the known
and the unknown. And the manifestation of that
unknown just keeps kind of come to the surface and it.
Yeah. Something else that you
mentioned. I, I, I'd say it's a theme is
magical thinking. Oh yeah.
Which I love, but I think sometimes people can be
dismissive, right? Of, of that concept of, of
finding meaning in things. And I noticed, you know, it gave
you such a strong sense of connection and feeling tethered
to your dad, to Charlie. Can you talk more about the role
of magical thinking and what that played in your journey and
why it was important to call those moments out in the memoir?
Yeah, that's a great question. And, you know, it's interesting.
We just, I had a book club discussion the other night and
someone asked me, you know, my mom said, isn't it wonderful
that you belong to the mystery? That was the the tagline when
she said you might have a different father when I was 17.
And even though I question, you know, whether she thinks I said
it and I think she said it, and who knows what the truth was,
but I can still acknowledge that their mystery was a big part of
this whole story. And whether I like it or not,
whether the teenage teenager self would likes it or not, in a
large way, I do belong to the mystery because this whole
mystery has been unfolding in so many mysterious ways.
That includes the magical thinking that has both sides.
There's a light side to it and there's a shadow side to it.
The light side is that it did. I'm a Pisces, so it helps me
sort of navigate this, this world in the next.
And for me, when I was not willing to be in relationship to
myself as I was, I needed to believe in these conversations I
was having with my dad after he died.
And that if I just have, you know, the universe promise me
these things or, or deliver these human beings into my path
and then follow them. If I didn't believe that those
were some sort of larger order or larger connection to or
wisdom, then I, I think I would have felt really, really, really
untethered. And I was already untethered.
So it kind of gave me a little bit of a North Star that said
the dark side of it is that it prevented me from being in
relationship to myself as I was magical thinking by its very
nature. And the same with fixing even is
that it's it's something out there, it's something in the
future. It's something that tells us
that maybe something's better over here than meeting ourselves
where we are. And that has was, like I said in
the beginning, the surrendering to what is was where my greatest
transformation was. It wasn't through the magical
thinking and believing that I could have all of these things
that I wanted in the future. Yeah.
I think when we're sort of powerless over how our stories
unfold, it gives you that sense of, well, I'm going to make
meaning of this, and it gives you that ownership and power.
Yeah. And it it helps us find the love
in in chaos. And there are so many, I've
heard that so many times, Alexis, where someone will end
up connecting with another person or connecting with the
place and then it turns out they were related or that had a
connection to that person that was part of our DNAI even it's,
you know, my husband's name is David.
My that was my father that raised me.
Of course I knew that his middle name is Charles, that you can't
make that stuff up. No, you can't.
You can't start reading. And when I knew that I had
another dad. Right, right, exactly so there.
Is does make me think that there there are unseen forces, I and
it and I don't want to claim to know the truth.
I don't want to claim to say just because I can't see it
doesn't mean it's there. This part of our stories is
quite mysterious and magical. And I do have to think that
there is a lot more at play than we can see.
And that gives me, that gives me, if nothing else, it gives me
a sense of agency and beauty within the chaos.
Absolutely well put. You touched on it right.
Your mom introduced some of the the mystery and isn't isn't that
what was the line it's. Oh, your father might not be
your father, but isn't it more interesting that you belong to
the? Mystery belonging to the
mystery, yes, so clearly your mother.
I think it just is such an interesting character, for lack
of a better word, in the memoir. And obviously, like, in addition
to the role that our raised fathers and our biological
fathers play in DNA surprises, our our relationships with our
mothers are huge piece of this. And I was really struck by the
passage you wrote about a pivotal moment in your story
when you're staying with your mother.
Can you read that excerpt from Chapter 34?
I would love to, and this is important for me too, because I
was also just speaking with someone that read the book and
they said one of the themes that I found is that you were always
looking for the love. And it, it's funny because I
don't think I consciously set out to write this book saying I
want to look for the love in all these situations.
But I'm so glad that that came through because this could have
been a story about blame and judgement and resentment and
abandonment and all of those things.
And for me, I knew in the writing, because I was writing
it for myself, I, I, I was looking for healing.
And the healing was going to happen through acknowledging
that we're all human and, and, and finding the love in all of
their foibles and all of their, you know, all their whole life.
We all have stuff that we're going to be messing up and
messing with other people's lives through those messes I
never planned for them to happen, erupting without
warning. My adult self can't rationalize
away the child's fury. You were supposed to protect me,
she screams. Not back in the movie theater,
but 40 years ago when I first shaped the word Dad.
I asked her to tell the Charlie story over and over again,
trying to understand her choice to stay in the dark.
I explode again. We hug, I explode again, we cry,
I explode again, we talk through it.
This thawing business is a slushy mess.
Mom's shadow gobbler is fat and her brain's emotional dial is
getting a workout. And then I hear it, Soft but
differentiating. Consonants free are tangled
branches, tiny shoots pushed down, down, down from my feet.
Her beautiful glassy eyes are inches from mine, vulnerable but
certain. I'm so sorry, Kim.
I'm so sorry I didn't protect you and that I didn't pursue the
truth. I was so focused on keeping
everything together, I was afraid to find out the truth and
risk everything falling apart. I hear, sorry, I hear, pursue
truth, but it's the everyday you, Incarnate and valid that
fortifies and repairs. The snow globe shatters.
I no longer identify as an accessory to her story.
I am not the neat epilogue to her choices.
I'm an individual with my own needs, my own desires, my own
failures. Someone who was protected from
the truth, not protected by the truth.
Someone who didn't get to decide her own story because it was
edited and tidied up before she was even born.
And now I get to We hold each other.
I feel no blame, only deep, undying love for the woman now
and also the woman then who did her very best to protect me from
hurt, only to discover 40 years later that the truth can hurt,
but it also can heal. It does hurt.
It does heal. I just love this excerpt.
It so beautifully captures, I think, the, the empathy that a
lot of people have for their moms.
I think, like you said, there can be this, this anger, this
blame and, and, and sometimes I think it depends right on the,
on the mother's reaction in these situations.
But personally, this really resonated with me.
A lot of people struggle with their moms.
How did you get to this point of just deep undying love and
releasing of the blame and anger?
A lot of it I, I attribute to her.
My husband and I both watched her at her young, you know,
she's 81 years old now. So this was 7081 years.
I say young, but old. She could have very much frozen
her reaction, which at the beginning was, who are you going
to tell and why do you need to share this?
She never dismissed why it was affecting me so much like some
friends did, but she definitely was a little concerned about how
much I was going to share it. And we watched her over 11 years
very much transform her relationship to this story to
the point where she could look in my eyes and just with undying
pride and love and say, I am so proud of you.
I'm just so proud of you. And also, I think part of it
maybe came when I wrote the story because she could she read
the manuscript before I ever, you know, like I said, it wasn't
planning. I wasn't planning on sharing it
with a role that sat on a hard drive for three years before I
shared it with anybody. And then I pulled it out and
shared that manuscript with my mom.
And I think she felt represented well.
I think she felt my love in the story and that I wasn't trying
to blame. So I, you know, had I not
written the story, she might not have known how much reverence
and respect I was holding for her in this process, which might
just be, you know, a form of really good communication.
I don't think I probably could have communicated all that's in
this book with her over a dinner.
So I think she felt very respected and held.
And for me, the neurological disorder that I'm like I
mentioned earlier, we got so bad that I ended up moving in with
her. I, I flew to Colorado and I, I
just didn't plan on staying there for seven months.
I was just pursuing other healers there, but I ended up
staying for seven months. And I think her seeing me really
fall apart and in a very, very desperate, desperate place, the
mother in her rose up and wanted to protect and saw that the mess
was what we both needed to hold instead of the neat tidy story
with putting a bow on it. We both got to hold the mess
together. We both wanted to fix it.
And I was pursuing all kinds of healers there, but nothing
worked. And so we were alkalizing the
pain together. I remember so many times I would
just put my head in her lap and she would hold her hands on my
head and we would cry and we would cry and we would cry.
So there was, it was a 7 month journey that I think was part of
the alchemizing of the love that was emerging from this.
That's beautiful. That's that's incredible.
And unfortunately, I don't think a lot of people get that
opportunity right. So it's, it was so wonderful to
read that somebody got to have that experience and and the
power that that had. You've touched on some of these
things, right? Your condition, the various
health challenges that you've had.
You've experienced a lot of interesting life, good, good and
bad, you might say, right? Different careers,
relationships, growing up, your parents, their marriage.
And yet this memoir really is anchored on your DNA surprise
and this revelation. And I'd love for you to talk
about why that is. Maybe because to the point that
you mentioned where maybe some of your friends didn't
understand why it was such a, a big moment in your life, a big
event in your life. I think it would be interesting
to hear you explain why, even though you've had this very full
life, this really was the anchor in your.
Yeah, I love how you say that this is the anchor to the story.
You're so right. And I can say very simply it's
because I finally came home to myself when I knew I it.
It's it's as if the inner and the outer finally merged.
All of the feelings, all the anxiousness, the sicknesses,
let's call that the underworld. And then all the presentations
of who I thought I was to be. The career, the identity, the
relationships there, it's like they never could come home to
one another. And finding out who my dad was,
thus finding out who I was. It's like the two, if you could
visualize, it's like the, the underworld and the outer world
just collided and they, they joined for the first time.
And I have felt nothing but grace since then and grace
within the, the adversity and this, this strange neurological
stuff. I, I'm dizzy right now, but
it's, I feel solid and calm in a way that I have never, ever
experienced. I feel stillness even within all
of the movement. That's as if something just
finally the schism was healed. And that's why the tagline even
in my book, The currents that Carry You Home.
Yeah. We, you know, I do think that
there are so many ways that these stories heal us and they
must not have the outcome that we want.
I'm no, I'm very, very fortunate with the way that my outcome was
and the sense of the family. And even though there's tragedy
within that, but I think just the very nature of coming home
to who we are is, is very powerful, especially when it's
lived in us, but it's unknown. It's felt in us, but it doesn't
have a place to land. The book is now out in the
world. Congratulations.
But obviously, as the title says, your feelings, your life,
it's unfixed. So how would you say that you're
doing today with your DNA surprise?
Oh, I feel so much gratitude. I feel like it continues to
actually, the mystery of it continues, which is part in due
to the relationships that have developed from this with the
family. A lot of it to do with this book
out in the world and the conversations that are coming
from that. I didn't know how many people
needed to hear that it's OK to be unfixed.
I thought it was the message that I really needed and it
started to resonate with me. But I think the world is ready
to let their sales down and just meet life as it is.
We've been fed so much messaging around how to improve and self
actualize and all of the growth is, I'm not dismissing that, but
I think it's just been very out of balance with the meeting life
as it is. So I feel very dizzy.
I had a horrible migraine yesterday and I am happier than
I've ever been. And I'm also very much just kind
of like going for the ride I never planned for like I this
book was not supposed to be shared with the world and it's
happening. And so I'm like, well, what's
next? I'm surrendered to kind of
experiencing what lands in my lap and unfolding and engaging
with that. And I really don't know where
it's going to take me because this, this book was not my in my
design, not on my bucket list. If you don't mind, I have two
more questions for you. The first question is, is simply
what advice do you have for parents who may be keeping adna
surprise from their child? Oh my goodness.
I know it's painful and I know it's scary that this could blow
everything up, but your child deserves to know.
Your child deserves to know and, and it's not necessarily that
it's going to be a big deal for them.
You let them have their own reaction.
It might not be anything, it might be life changing, but I
think that there is more to, I want to acknowledge the value of
our intelligence of our bodies. And I think when our bodies
sense that something's not quite right, it manifests in other
ways. And so even if it's just for the
the health of that individual, their physical, emotional,
mental health, they need to know because that will be some kind
of coming home and healing for them.
And what? Advice do you have for someone
who just uncovered adna surprise?
Go slow. This is this is my advice in
reaction to how I did not do it. I take it slowly.
Digest. Don't be too eager to share with
the world right away. Maybe find one person you can
confide in. But let the pace.
I'm coming back to the body again.
Let the pace of your body guide you.
I became so manic and panicked with the information that I
started telling the story to everyone and anyone and it only
exaggerated the panic in me. And, and it was as if I was
trying, I was trying to find a place for it to land, but where
it should have been landing was in my body.
And that that pace was a lot slower than the pace of where my
mind needed it to go to resolve. Because that's what I was trying
to do when I was telling the story to everybody on the bus
and in the plane. And it's like I was trying to
land it somewhere. So I would say take it, take it
slow, do lots of writing for with yourself and ask.
Ask how it wants to be shared, if it even wants to be shared,
and let that be your guide. Great advice, Kimberly, thank
you so much for joining me today.
If people want to pick up Unfixed, where can they find?
It everywhere you can find it, you can go on Barnes and Noble
online, Amazon Bookshop, some of the indie stores around the
country are starting to stock it.
It's going to depend on, you know, our current political
climate and all of that, but you can definitely find it online.
Amazing. Thank you again.
I really appreciated this conversation.
Oh, Alexis, this is just incredible.
What a. What an.
Honor, thanks again to Kimberly Warner for joining me.
If you'd like to pick up a copy of Unfixed, I've linked it in
the show notes. And if you have adna surprise
that you'd like to share, please submit your story at
dnasurprises.com. For early ad free access to
episodes, join me over on patreon@patreon.com/DNA
Surprises. Until next time, DNA Surprises
is hosted, produced and edited by me, Alexis Oursalt.
It is mixed and mastered by Josh Oursalt of Siren Recording
Studios.