✨The Empress Questionnaire✨Get to Know Director, Writer, and Advocate Kimberly Warner!✨👑✨

Meet the latest Empress Editions Author as we announce her stunning memoir!

✨ A vibrant space for midlife women, The Empress now reaches over two million readers through our networks of networks. ✨ From bestselling author Alisa Kennedy Jones. ✨ If you enjoy content about midlife, humor, and agency, I’d love to welcome you as part of our community. ✨ For only $50/year ($4.17 a month!) or $5/month, you’ll gain access to all my articles, Monday columns, book clubs, and virtual events.

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Fellow Empresses, How are you?

When I first read Kimberly Warner’s memoir last year, I was struck by its cinematic depth and the way its storylines unfolded with the precision of a limited series. Unfixed weaves together two mysteries running on parallel timelines, powered by two richly layered characters in profound internal conflict. The heart of the narrative is as emotionally gripping as it is intellectually stimulating—where yearning curiosity collides with the fear and delight of uncovering truths about one’s parentage.

The book resonates on many levels: the intricacies of family and identity, the unflinching bravery it takes to confront the unknown, and the universal question of how to find home when life feels unmoored. With a narrative essence reminiscent of Noah Hawley’s Fargo infused with the haunting, folk-mystery undertones of Where the Crawdads Sing, Kimberly’s storytelling is further elevated by her intimate portrayal of living with chronic illness.

For me personally, this memoir hit home in an extraordinary way. As someone navigating the relentless uncertainty of chronic illness, Kimberly’s reflections on her body and mind as unreliable allies mirrored my own experience of falling—always falling—through the liminal space of midlife. Her voice, much like Dani Shapiro’s in Inheritance, is one we’re honored to amplify through Empress Editions.

We are thrilled to announce that Empress Editions has acquired the world rights to Unfixed: a memoir of family, mystery, and the currents that carry you home by Kimberly Warner, set to release in bookstores everywhere on October 14, 2025.

This is more than a memoir; it’s a beacon for anyone seeking answers, solace, or simply the courage to keep exploring life’s mysteries.

The waitlist is live!

Join the Unfixed waiting list now for your chance to receive:

• A VIP gift bag filled with curated items inspired by the memoir

• A luxury writing retreat and spa getaway to rejuvenate your creative spirit

• Updates on readings, events, and limited autographed editions

Be among the first to experience Kimberly Warner’s unforgettable journey.

This week, of course, we’re thrilled to feature her in the Empress Questionnaire. I hope you enjoy the insights and inspiration she shares as much as I have.

About Kimberly…

Kimberly Warner is a film director, writer, and patient advocate based in Oregon. After pursuing a Master's degree in Naturopathic and Classical Chinese Medicine at NUNM, Kimberly made a bold career shift—exchanging herbs for a camera and prescriptions for storytelling. Her narrative films, including CPR and 9, have received awards and screened at festivals worldwide. She has also created impactful brand and documentary projects, including Microsoft’s human-centered design campaign and the docu-series Music Changes Everything.

In 2015, Kimberly developed Mal de Débarquement Syndrome, a rare neurological condition causing a constant rocking sensation. This experience led her to found Unfixed Media, a platform sharing stories of people living with chronic conditions. Through award-winning docu-series, podcasts, and essays, she champions the idea that living well is not about eliminating our wounds but understanding how they shape our identities and empower us to help others.

Kimberly writes and speaks widely, serving on editorial boards, hosting panels at esteemed institutions, and contributing to medical education initiatives. Recently, Kimberly shared her serialized memoir, Unfixed, on Substack, quickly gaining a devoted readership as it resonated deeply with those navigating their own challenges. She continues to publish weekly essays, interviews, and videos, exploring meaning within adversity and the value in what we might reflexively dismiss.

In Her Words…

“After creating audio/visual media for Unfixed for several years, I turned to Substack to share my memoir, serialized, one chapter every Sunday for 56 weeks. In this deeply personal narrative, I recount my journey of unraveling—how early traumas, perfectionism, and a nervous system stuck in “freeze” became fertile ground for chronic illness to take root in my body.

Unfixed is a sweeping narrative of my inner journey toward wholeness, despite physical and psychological derailments. Through visceral prose, imaginary correspondence, and poetry, I revisit the unnerving circumstances of childhood in the '80s and '90s, when the New Age movement redefined marriage, health, and sexuality. As my body breaks and family secrets emerge, I lean into a steadiness of spirit, discovering that the incomprehensible can become imaginable, and the possibility that frightens me most becomes a doorway into peace.

While I’ve spent years creating media through the Unfixed production company to amplify stories of chronic illness and resilience, Unfixed the memoir is the culmination of this work. It charts the winding path to wholeness, expanding our definition of what healing and “living well” truly mean. My hope is that Unfixed offers solidarity, courage, and hope for anyone navigating the challenges of an unfixed life (and I think that’s all of us)—one that embraces pain, uncertainty, and the unexpected while finding peace in the untamable journey of becoming.”

1. What is your idea of perfect midlife happiness?

Perfect midlife happiness? Let’s start by throwing “perfect” out the window. Too much of my life was spent chasing perfection—perfect ballet extensions, perfect skin, perfect grades, perfect career path—all fleeting victories that only deepened the void within me. I couldn’t hear, let alone value, the messy, beautiful complexity of simply being alive. Now that perfection is no longer my "enemy of the good," I find myself in a midlife that’s not perfect but pretty darn lovely.

And let’s talk about happiness while we’re at it. Do we even know what “happy” means? It feels more like a vague, all-encompassing label than something real and tangible. Instead, I focus on embodied experiences: moments of contentment, wonder, peace, or awe. If I ask myself, “Am I happy?” my brain starts doing mental gymnastics, trying to boil every experience into one tidy answer. So I let my body take the lead—it's much better at answering this question in the moment.

Here’s the kicker: despite living the last decade with the constant, unnerving sensation of dizziness and unsteadiness, I’m more at peace than I’ve ever been. It’s a kind of happiness that doesn’t hinge on how I feel internally or what’s happening externally. It’s rooted in gratitude and surrender—a trust that midlife, with all her quirks and curveballs, knows what she’s doing.

So my idea of perfect midlife happiness is this: ditch the perfect, don’t overthink the happy, and settle into gratitude for the wild, dynamic experience of midlife herself. She’s a force to be reckoned with, and I’m just here, hands up, enjoying the ride.

2. Which empress, queen, goddess, or mythical figure do you most identify with?

If I had to pick, I’d say I’m a blend of Inanna and Persephone—two mythical women who know a thing or two about descending into the dark.

Inanna, the Sumerian goddess of Heaven and Earth, has a story that dates back to the Neolithic age and still resonates today. Summoned to the underworld—the metaphorical realm of the deep unconscious—she embarks on a journey to wholeness. But it’s not a journey of accumulation; it’s one of shedding. She lets go of her former self, her power, and her abilities until she’s stripped bare, empty. Only then does she gain insight into death and return to the world above with a profound appreciation for life’s natural cycles.

This resonates with me deeply, but where Inanna’s story ends, Persephone’s begins. Unlike Inanna’s singular journey, Persephone—a Greek maiden-turned-queen of the underworld—descends and resurfaces over and over again. Every six months, she is pulled back into the depths, a continual cycle of death and rebirth. Each descent changes her, bringing new lessons to share with her community when she returns.

That’s where the parallel to chronic illness comes in. It’s not a one-and-done experience but a perpetual cycle. Our bodies often dictate the rhythm, pulling us into isolation and helplessness, forcing us to pause and rest. But with each descent, there’s an opportunity for grace and eventual renewal—a chance to resurface stronger, wiser, and with something meaningful to share. It’s messy, it’s nonlinear, and it’s never easy. But like Persephone, we keep rising, again and again.

3. Which living midlife woman do you most admire? (And why?)

Maria Popova is my ultimate midlife muse. A Bulgarian-born essayist, poet, and cultural critic, Maria is a masterful cross-pollinator of ideas, an archaeologist of existence, unearthing gems of wisdom and holding them up to the light so we can all marvel at what it means to be alive.

She’s a one-woman empire of curiosity, weaving together literature, science, art, and philosophy to explore what it means to live a decent and rewarding life. For over a decade, her blog, The Marginalian (formerly Brain Pickings), has been my internet browser’s opening screen. I’ve devoured every essay she’s written—some multiple times—highlighting passages, scribbling them in notebooks, and saving quotes all over my phone.

Just last week, at the top of her “Best Books for 2024” newsletter, she wrote, “I read in order to fathom my life and deepen my living.” Cue my swooning. Maria’s words resonate deeply because they reflect her mission: to serve others by sharing the wisdom she has gathered from her lifelong quest for meaning. Her insights aren’t just about knowledge—they’re about creating connections between ideas and nurturing the human soul through those connections.

The funny thing? I had no idea what she looked like until recently. I had to Google her—and while I was at it, I found out she’s only 40! Technically, she’s just crossing into midlife, but let’s be honest: Maria has been channeling the wisdom of the ages since her 20s. With insatiable curiosity as her north star, I can only imagine how her insights will deepen as she fully settles into this chapter of life.

Her daily entries are more than just words on a screen; they are a compass for my thoughts, a lighthouse guiding me home, and a taproot nourishing me exactly where I stand. What I most admire about Maria in this phase of life is how she has recognized her unique gifts—her deep curiosity, her ability to synthesize knowledge, and her gift for weaving it into something accessible and enriching for others. This kind of service, where a woman recognizes what she has to offer and chooses to share it with the world, is an undeniably admirable quality of midlife. Maria embodies the wisdom that comes from years of learning, not just for personal enrichment, but to illuminate the path for others, making her an invaluable source of insight and inspiration in a world that often feels adrift.

4. What aspect of midlife or the peri/menopausal journey do you most deplore?

This one’s tough for me to answer because, honestly, my 20s, 30s, and 40s were way harder than where I am today. I wonder if others who’ve lived with chronic illness from a young age might say the same? After three decades of autoimmune challenges, I feel like I’m finally cracking the code—figuring out the hacks that work for me, the mindset that soothes my nervous and immune systems, and realizing that all those years of suffering brought me to this point of deep peace and gratitude.

So what’s “sucky” about peri/menopause? Maybe I haven’t hit the full brunt of it yet, or maybe my version of sucky is graded on a different scale after years of chronic sucky-ness. Compared to what I’ve been through, this phase feels pretty damn tame. Sure, I’m dizzy all the time, I don’t always sleep as deeply, and sometimes I have cramps that knock me out for a day. But hey, I no longer pass out from the pain like I used to, and I’ve embraced my nursing home hours—which, let’s be honest, I secretly always wanted but let my need to “be cool” override.

That said, I do notice something I find frustrating—and maybe even a bit heartbreaking—about this phase of life: the silence around it. Peri/menopause feels like this big, mysterious transition we’re all supposed to quietly endure, and that’s baffling to me. Half the population goes through it, yet how often do we talk about it openly? There’s a cultural stigma that suggests we’re becoming “less” somehow—less vibrant, less desirable, less relevant—and that, to me, is the real sucky part.

We live in an age of hypervisibility, where we can share every meal we eat and every mile we run, yet this enormous shift in a woman’s life gets relegated to whispers and euphemisms, or something to fix. If we treated peri/menopause like the epic transformation it is—a biological rite of passage—it could feel empowering instead of diminishing.

I guess what I’m saying is, the physical stuff isn’t what I deplore the most. It’s the way society expects us to go through it quietly as if it’s shameful or a secret we need to hide. But screw that. This is a transition, not a decline. If anything, I feel more in tune with my body and spirit than I ever have. I’ve shed the need to apologize for myself or prove my worth to anyone, and I’m leaning into the mess, the mystery, and the magic of this phase of life.

5. What do you most treasure or value about this phase of life?

What I treasure most about this phase of life is the distinct freedom that comes from no longer needing my body or my circumstances to feel or look a certain way in order for me to be at peace. It’s a freedom I couldn’t have imagined in my younger years. Back then, hyper-vigilance to every sensation, every symptom, and every deviation from what I thought of as “normal” kept me trapped—unable to fully experience the full catastrophe of life or to discover just how resilient I actually am within it.

Letting go of needing life to conform to some ideal has been ridiculously freeing. If someone had told me a decade ago that I could have a screaming headache, feel dizzy, and endure burning ovulation cramps all at the same time and still have a perfectly enjoyable day, I would’ve thought they were certifiably insane. But here I am, doing just that—and maybe a touch of madness is my secret sauce. If so, I’ll take it.

Life, I’ve come to see, is a mad, whirling dervish of experiences. The constant turbulence I feared in the past is now something I’ve learned to dance with. It reminds me of Rumi’s poem The Guest House, where he writes about welcoming each emotion as an unexpected visitor, even if it storms through the door and leaves your house in disarray. This phase of life has landed me, finally, in a place where I can entertain them all.

I value the unshakable sense that I’m no longer resisting life but embracing it in its entirety. Whether it’s pain, joy, confusion, or clarity, I can hold it all with open hands. That’s the freedom I’ve found in midlife—not the absence of chaos, but the ability to welcome it as part of the story.

This phase feels like an initiation into a deeper understanding of myself and the world, where I can finally savor the richness of being alive, even when it’s messy, even when it hurts. It’s as though I’ve stopped clinging to the shore and let the river carry me. And in that surrender, I’ve found strength, clarity, and a peace that no longer depends on perfection—or even comfort.

6. If you could share one key midlife lesson, hack, or nugget of wisdom, what would it be?

If I could share one key midlife lesson, hack, or nugget of wisdom, it would be this: embrace the paradox of suffering and joy. Rupert Spira distills it beautifully—yes, he’s a man, but this wisdom feels profoundly universal:

“If we want to learn to live without suffering, we first have to learn to live with it. When suffering is welcomed so completely that there is not the slightest resistance to it, what we were seeking, by trying to get rid of it, is revealed at its heart.”

At first glance, this might sound impossible, or at least impractical. But in my experience, leaning into discomfort instead of resisting it has been transformative. Suffering, when fully embraced, often reveals unexpected gifts—strength, clarity, and an unshakable sense of peace.

For a shorter, more actionable version, I turn to River Phoenix:

“Come to the rescue with love, and peace will follow.”

Simple, profound, and true. But let’s not overlook the practical side of midlife wisdom. It’s easy to get tangled in the weeds of philosophy and forget that sometimes the answer lies not in thinking but in doing.

Move your body. Go to the woods. Roll around on the floor with a cat. Let your body lead you back to life.

Two years ago, my brother gifted me a weekly Zoom session with Evan, a brilliant trainer and polymath living in Colorado. (DM me if you want his contact info.) Every Thursday morning, I head to my garage, open Zoom, and spend an hour strengthening, balancing, and playing. These sessions have been nothing short of revelatory.

Before Evan, I thought aging was a steady decline—a slow accumulation of aches and losses. He’s taught me otherwise. Through structured exercises that awaken my “inner pharmacy” of endorphins, hormones, and brain-derived neurotropic factors (yes, we make them when we lift weights, and these little proteins help regenerate brain cells!), I’ve grown more confident, resilient, and playful in my body (and mind) than I was in my twenties.

This isn’t about reversing aging—Evan would agree that’s a fool’s errand. It’s about embracing the body I have now and preparing for the one I’ll have thirty years down the road. I want Grandma Kim to be as strong, curious and engaged with life as she is today.

Midlife has shown me that wisdom isn’t just a mental exercise—it’s a full-body experience. Suffering and joy, rest and movement, love and resilience—they’re all part of the dance. And I’m learning, step by step, to enjoy the rhythm.

7. What gives you the greatest sense of agency in midlife? (i.e. “Knowing that I can…”)

I never know that I can, but a perfect storm of personal attributes (or deficits?) keeps me aligned with Yoda’s “There is no try, only do.” A hefty dose of impulsivity, a brain that thrives on kinesthetic learning, an inability to strategize, a love for projects, and a deep curiosity all combine to keep me engaged and moving forward.

For me, midlife isn’t about having a set plan—it’s about embracing the unexpected. The uncertainty of this stage—whether it’s physical changes or shifting priorities—has made me more comfortable with just doing, rather than trying to figure everything out. There’s less pressure to identify the “right” thing, the perfect purpose, or what I’m “meant to be doing.” Instead, I’ve found freedom in moving through each day without a clear map. It’s empowering to trust that my body and instincts will guide me through the twists and turns, with no need to control or predict every step.

8. Give us the headline for your Empress Age. (one that captures the bold narrative you are rewriting for the latter half of your life)

“The Empress’s Winding Way: Crowning Calm in Chaos (with Occasional Faceplant)”

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Kimberly’s Empress Edit

1. Andrea Gibson’s essays and poetry Poet and essayist known for their emotional, socially-conscious work on love, illness, identity, and activism.

2. Hyperbole and a Half The genius blog and book (by the same name) by Allie Brosh, self-described as "heroic, caring, alert and flammable."

3. Creo Chocolate - Black Sesame Seed Brittle Award-winning, roasty, toasty, sweet goodness.

4. Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer. A blend of science and Indigenous wisdom on how to live harmoniously with nature.

5. Face Fluf Maybe I’m biased, but the best, most effective natural skincare line on the market. Grown and made by yours truly.

6. Annie’s Heirloom strawberry blonde calendula seeds I’m just as nuts about this variety as their pollinators.

7. Le Bon Shoppe boyfriend socks Socks rule and these make me feel like I’m 50 going on 10.

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Where readers can find you:

www.unfixedmedia.com

www.kimberlywarner.com

http://facefluf.etsy.com

We hope you enjoyed this week’s questionnaire.

Yours in Grandeur & Deep Sh*t,

ps - I am a human typo. Amnesty appreciated.

*The information contained in this post is intended for informational purposes only and is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any illness. Before using any practices or products referenced in this piece or others, always consult your healthcare providers, read all labels, and heed all cautions that come with the products. Information received from this piece, or anywhere in this Substack, should never be used in place of a consultation or advice from a healthcare provider. If you suspect you have any adverse conditions, please consult your healthcare providers immediately. This Substack, including Alisa Jones and any other writers or editors, disclaims any responsibility for any possible adverse effects from the use of any information contained herein. Opinions of any writers in this Substack are their own, and the Substack does not accept responsibility for statements made by writers. This Substack does not make any representations or warranties about a writer’s qualifications or credibility. 

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I’d love to see you as part of the community — and I hope you enjoy these pieces above about midlife love, agency, and believing in yourself.