Kimberly Warner’s DNA Surprise: An interview with the author of Unfixed

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Kimberly Warner's Journey and the Unfixed Philosophy

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.

Speaker 2

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.

Speaker 1

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.

The Unraveling of Kimberly's DNA Surprise Story

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.

From Neurological Disorder to an Unfixed Life Philosophy

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.

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.

The Hidden Roots of Anxiety and a Search for Belonging

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.

Connecting with Charlie Through Imaginative Letters and Poetry

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.

How Pre-Internet Discovery Shaped a Life of Uncertainty

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.

Navigating Chaos with Magical Thinking and Unseen Forces

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.

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.

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.

A Journey of Forgiveness and Deep Love with My Mother

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.

Finding Inner Peace and Coming Home Through DNA Discovery

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.

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.

Embracing an Unfixed Life, Essential Advice, and Episode Wrap-up

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.

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.