What happens when a chronic health condition sweeps away the foundation of your life? How do you continue with a new set of life parameters that feels like limitations, losses, and painful obstacles? Unfixed is a documentary film-in-progress featuring people who let go of the never-ending search for a cure and embraced their lives just as they are right now. It features 20 people from around the world living and thriving with chronic conditions.
The film acknowledges the horrors we face when our lives are changed by unexpected health troubles. A sense of failure fills our lives and we focus on what we’ve lost.
- Loss of identity
- Loss of career
- Loss of control
We emerge from mourning our losses when we connect with “the love that is possible when things go wrong.”
- Loving ourselves just as we are
- Loving the larger definitions of ourselves
- Loving our unfixed bold spirits
The documentary film team asked 20 members of their #UnfixedCommunity to write letters to their chronic conditions — MS, Crohn’s, ALS, trigeminal neuralgia, transverse myelitis, TBI, blood cancer, Ehlers-Danlos, Bartonella, and more. Some of their messages parallel those I learned in my struggle to find a life beyond Lyme disease suffering.
- I fought you every day of my life.
- I thought I could fix you.
- You have asked me to give up so much more than I thought I could be content losing.
Like the people in this video, I found liberation in accepting that I was unfixed.
- I was liberated when I stopped fighting my health reality and trying to fix a chronic condition.
- I was liberated when I gave up my pre-disability expectations.
- I was liberated to live fully without trying to fix the unfixable.
Are you unfixed? Liberated?
How do you talk to your chronic condition?
Have you given up the desperate drive to fix yourself and learned to live a powerful unfixed life?
What would you say in a letter to your chronic condition?
Unfixed also has a website.
Unfixed is a feature documentary about the stories of humans who are in various stages of learning to thrive with extreme, chronic, incurable conditions. Our culture is obsessed with fixer-upper stories, miracle cures and answers but many wake up each day without any of these.
Our world needs more models for how to live a powerful, unfixed life - a life liberated from fixed notions of how we must feel in order to live fully. Unfixed humans may be in pain but they are learning to integrate it into a larger definition of themselves. Unfixed humans feel the limitations of their body but their spirits are bold and positively engaged with themselves, their families or their communities.
Unfixed aims, through the telling of these stories, to uncover the essential truths in humans who are finding ways, grandiose or intimate, public or private, to make their own unfixed path a heroic one.
Kosability is BY and FOR
- PEOPLE LIVING WITH DISABILITIEs;
- WHO LOVE SOMEONE WITH A DISABILITY; OR
- WHO WANT TO KNOW MORE ABOUT THE ISSUES.
OUR DISCUSSIONS ARE OPEN THREADS IN THE CONTEXT OF THIS COMMUNITY.
FEEL FREE TO
- COMMENT ON THE DIARY TOPIC;
- ASK QUESTIONS OF THE DIARIST OR GENERALLY TO EVERYONE;
- SHARE SOMETHING YOU'VE LEARNED; OR
- gripe ABOUT YOUR SITUATION.
OUR ONLY RULE IS TO BE KIND.
bullies WILL BE ignored and/or obliterated.
for more elaboration on our group rule please read this story.
At KosAbility we amicably discuss any and all matters pertaining to health. Our discussions are not medical advice. Medical advice can only be provided by a qualified physician who has examined the patient. If you have worrisome symptoms please see your doctor!
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For our monthly meeting next week, elenacarlena has a story on how to help someone who fell get up from the floor. Sunday 30 August at 4 pm Pacific / 7 pm Eastern
