This article originally appeared in the Summer 2025 issue of On The Level.
Writing in the Wake
How Writing Became My Anchor in a Sea of Uncertainty
By Kimberly Warner, vestibular patient and author
I’ll be honest, the last thing I wanted to do in the early years of living with Mal de Débarquement Syndrome was write. The constant sensation of rocking and bobbing jumbled my brain, like synapses flooded in stormwater. Words came as fragments, flotsam adrift on a sea I couldn’t steady. Even thinking in complete sentences was a near impossibility. So for three years, I didn’t write anything more than the occasional note-to-self in the margins of my calendar, usually to mark the date of my next doctor’s appointment. At the time, I was looking for rescue, not reflection. Salvation meant finding a cure; I had no desire to lean into this unresolved, disorienting in-between, where process itself becomes the destination.
But around year three, a different kind of urgency emerged. I needed to start writing—not to be understood by others, not even to heal—but simply to stay connected to something solid within myself. To tether. To not forget. Because right around the time my dizziness began, I also learned that the father who raised me wasn’t my biological father. Two destabilizing currents, one in the body, one in the bloodline, collided. The ground beneath me shifted in every direction.
With my husband away at work, I sat at his computer, sometimes writing just a few sentences before lying down on the carpeted floor to recover. It wasn’t easy. My brain had to learn how to focus again. But each time I returned to the page, I felt a small sense of purpose. In a life that had emptied out, writing gave me small footholds, moments of coherence inside the chaos.
Though my outer world felt like open water, I found the inner landscape intimate, almost safe. I was weary of chasing cures and outrunning this dizzying new self. Writing became a kind of homecoming and invitation to trace my way back to the beginning: to the child’s longings, the teenager’s compulsions, the young woman’s striving. Through the act of writing, I began to unwind the tangled threads of identity. To face, with curiosity and compassion, the mess and grace of living an unpolished, unplanned, unfixed life.
Four months later, I finished whatever-it-was-I-was-writing. Something in me felt complete. I dragged the document onto an external drive and left it there. I didn’t share it with anyone—not even my family. But as my story continued to evolve I began to feel ready to return to the words I’d once written. By then, I had been officially diagnosed by Dr. Shin Beh, thanks to the rise of telemedicine during the pandemic, and had begun building a relationship with my newfound biological family. It felt like the right moment to share the story with my mom, aunt, and brother, offering a window into my world. To say: This is what it’s been like inside the waves. This is what I’ve been navigating.
Their response was wholehearted. With their blessing and encouragement, I began serializing the story on Substack, posting one chapter a week for an inner circle of family and friends. I imagined it as a small, contained process. But what began as a quiet offering rippled outward. Over the course of two years, this intimate circle bloomed into a global community of generous, engaged readers.
And something remarkable happened: though many readers didn’t have a vestibular disorder, or even chronic illness, they still recognized themselves in the current. They, too, knew what it was like to be unmoored in midlife. To lose orientation. To grieve an old self and begin again, unsure of the shape of what was coming next. In this collective drifting, and slow regrounding, we met each other.
When I reached the final chapter, I raised a glass to this unlikely fellowship. These readers had not simply witnessed the story; they had held it. They had held me. Without their quiet companionship, this fragile sprout of a narrative might have withered. Still dizzy? Yes. But wildly rooted into the loam of a thousand others? Yes, this too.
I put the memoir away again, this time with a full heart and a quiet sense of completion.
Six months later, an email arrived from a publisher who had been reading the serialized version all along. She asked if I would consider traditional publication. And the rest, as they say, is history.
Today, you can order Unfixed: A Memoir of Family, Mystery, and the Currents that Carry You Home (Empress Editions). What began as a private act of anchoring has become a public invitation—a lyrical exploration of identity, inheritance, and the deep wisdom of the body.
Unfixed: A Memoir of Family, Mystery, and the Currents That Carry You Home is a haunting exploration of identity, loss, and the unsteady ground of becoming.
When a midlife DNA test reveals that the man who raised her isn’t her biological father, Kimberly Warner is drawn into two parallel mysteries: one excavating the silence surrounding her beloved father’s death, the other tracing the absence of a stranger whose blood shapes her very being.
As she unravels the secrets hidden beneath her family’s story, another rupture emerges—this time in her body. A mysterious illness takes hold, leaving her adrift in dizziness, and a growing awareness that her body knows truths language cannot hold.
Told through lyrical prose and imagined correspondence, Unfixed carries readers across decades and terrain, from the New Age spirituality of Warner’s 1980s childhood to the tidal unpredictability of midlife, where certainty dissolves and the soul insists on truth.
This is not a memoir of resolution, but of reckoning. For anyone who has sought refuge in the known, Unfixed offers a quiet transformation: healing not as closure, but as relationship. Wholeness not as solidity, but as the willingness to remain present to what is.
With echoes of Inheritance, and the emotional undercurrents of Where the Crawdads Sing, Unfixed reveals the beauty and heartbreak of uncovering truths long buried. It is a celebration of the body’s wisdom, the resilience of the human spirit, and a poignant reminder that even in the most uncertain lives, there is space for hope, connection, and becoming. And what feels like drift may be the current carrying us home.
