Melany Heger Author and Psychologist

Melany Heger Author and Psychologist I am a nonfiction author and a licensed psychologist in the Philippines. I offer counseling services for individuals and corporate clients.

I am a nonfiction author and licensed psychologist, dedicated to helping individuals navigate their personal journeys holistically with insight and compassion. My expertise blends yoga, acupressure, and psychotherapy. I offer individual and group counseling sessions. We can work together one-on-one, or you can contact me for corporate engagements. I also offer home visits.

📚 Books and Being 📚✨ Book reflections from a psychologist & author📖 Creative You by David Goldstein & Otto Kroeger and L...
02/04/2026

📚 Books and Being 📚
✨ Book reflections from a psychologist & author
📖 Creative You by David Goldstein & Otto Kroeger and Life Types by Sandra Krebs Hirsh & Jean M. Kummerow

Emotional regulation is of utmost importance to me.
I write essays to create order and to make ambiguous things clear.
Writing nonfiction aligns with my Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) profile, which is INTJ.

Digging up these two old tomes refreshed my memory of how much I love this personality assessment. In fact, when they are ready, I ask my clients to take the online version to discover themselves more.
Socrates said, “Know thyself.”

As a young writer, I rode the feels. When a mood overtook me, I wrote. Poetry was my medium at seventeen. But that young writer grew up, encountered life, and as she evolved, so did her writing style.

We have many selves, and the essay-writing Melany evolved from the poetry-writing teen who was her earlier incarnation.

But personality alone does not explain everything.

It is also not just my INTJ personality style that influences my writing. I can’t deny that trauma response and neurobiology are heavy influences too.

As a child of an emotionally abusive parent (he is gone now, and I’ve forgiven him), my father’s pamana was CPTSD—Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Yet there has also been progress in life: as a mother, as a daughter, as a wife, and as a whole person.

So I continue rereading these books and keeping myself abreast of recent developments in Jungian Cognitive Typology, the deeper theoretical layer of the MBTI.

The older I get, the more I want to embody the truths that resonate with Jung’s teachings.

So what if my essays are cerebral and not literature-workshop friendly?

So what if I can’t keep up with platforms that reward performative behavior?

Sometimes I lose faith that this wonderful, tech-enabled world will still make space for a writer like me.

But then, I remember my supporters—few though they may be. I know and love every one of them, and in the end, sharp exhale here… it’s fine. 🌱

I can live with myself.

I am FINE with I write, what I post—candid poses, minimal makeup, and no videos or short-form content.

Fine can mean goods na ako, and di ako bulok.

Fine means I am acceptable to myself. (Subtext: I accept myself.)

live my authenticity, and I practice what I preach. 🖋️

“Know thyself,” the wise saying goes. I’ll add, “Don’t fight yourself.”

INTJs (The Architect), like me, need a ground plan.

Re-reading these two books helped me rebuild my writer SOP one year after my book launch, and after doing so, I feel better—settled.

Counter-culture? So be it. Gen X at heart forever. 🖤

📚 Books and Being 📚✨ Book reflections from a psychologist & author📖 The Lies You Told by Harriet TyceThe author shines i...
31/03/2026

📚 Books and Being 📚
✨ Book reflections from a psychologist & author
📖 The Lies You Told by Harriet Tyce

The author shines in her storytelling talent in this novel, her second one, written and set in the United Kingdom. It is a tale of the relationship between a mother and a daughter. Since my daughter is close to the age of the protagonist’s daughter, Robin, I couldn’t help but have my heart torn out when she is abducted. (She got rescued in the end, thank goodness! 💖)

The Big Lie here refers to Andrew’s. (He is the protagonist Sadie’s husband.) Sadie is abruptly propelled from her life in the USA back to the UK, to her deceased mother’s estate. At first, Sadie thought Andrew threw her out because he had an affair, but it turns out that he had work troubles involving some secret service (as in the agency) business. This looks to me like a plot hole. 📝

Anyway, even if there was a plot hole, the whole yarn held. My two cents are as follows. First, as a writer, I spotted two typos—very careless and grammatical. Second, as a psychologist: there are other lies and liars in this book, describing the everyday tendency of anybody—anybody on earth at all, young or old—to narrate meanings into their sometimes hurtful behavior. By hurtful behavior, I mean those that harm ourselves and, inadvertently, others.

Be aware of these small lies. They can build into giant, noxious ones—something that can destroy the trust of others in you. More deleteriously, unconscious non-truths we narrate to ourselves can erode our self-trust. 💬👉

📚 Books and Being 📚✨ Book reflections from a psychologist & author📖 The Big Leap by Gay HendricksThis book found me in a...
29/03/2026

📚 Books and Being 📚
✨ Book reflections from a psychologist & author
📖 The Big Leap by Gay Hendricks

This book found me in a roundabout way. It started with a client mentioning the YouTuber Jillz Guerin. When I finally watched her content, I was drawn to her ideas on cultivating feminine energy. At the time, I was already writing about the need to be more receptive—to move toward normal entitlement. You see, my default setting is restrictive entitlement. I would like to think I am correcting my self-esteem problem now. Low self-esteem has led me to be a cheapskate to myself. I used to be at home with this. Well, what can I say now? One step at a time for course correction. 📝

Jillz’s video eventually led me to The Big Leap. After reading it, I realized I was trying to stabilize at a higher baseline of emotional regulation. The Upper Limit Concept, Hendricks’ core idea, explains that everyone has an internal thermostat for how much positive energy, success, and ease they can handle. When things go too well, an internal alarm goes off because you’ve hit your threshold of comfort. You tend to bring yourself back down to a safer, more familiar level. And this is where self-sabotage comes in. By self-sabotage, I mean worrying excessively, getting sick (an involuntary somatic response), over-criticizing yourself, picking fights with loved ones, or deflecting compliments. 💬

I admit, this is the stuck point I am in right now. I continually try to get unstuck after finding myself enacting those scenarios. The process is excruciating—it’s a fight between two sides of myself. One side wants more yin; another is too yang.

After 40+ years in this body, I recognize that I have been all steel (my birth element as a Monkey), all yang, and all animus. I have resisted the expression of feminine energy—in Taoist belief, the yin. What I have is imbalance. Too avoidant of self-care and too queasy to receive others’ care or loving-kindness. Change has to start somewhere, hence my current exercises in non-self-denial. And explaining less. 🌟

Two nights ago, I saw a single image in a dream: a white root. To me, the message was clear—new neural wiring. As Gemini (I still call it Bard) puts it, “Neuronal rewriting after trauma refers to the brain’s capacity for neuroplasticity.” The dream communicated that, unconsciously, I am beginning to reset my Upper Limits at ground level, at the level of my brain. Good enough.

In Chinese, the word for faith is 信 (xìn). It’s composed of two radicals: “person” (人) and “word” (言). For an atheist woman like me, faith is a loaded word. This word 信, together with that white root, symbolizes change that lasts. By faith, I mean self-faith, self-trust—not surrender to some Other God. When there are many unknowns, the best way to stay anchored is to differentiate what you can control and what you can’t. You can be stable in your own self if you trust yourself and find your truths valid. 💖

Using the prefrontal cortex to choose a higher-order method over the automatic limbic responses of CPTSD (Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder) is hard. I am consciously trying to make friends with the dark, the unknown, because it is okay—I can count on myself to rescue me. This accommodation of the yin is coincidentally aligned with the Jungian practice of accepting the archetype of the Shadow (also characterized as dark). Both walk toward equilibrium. It’s about not picking at the wound of my trauma through overanalysis. It’s about overthinking, recognizing I am doing it, and then applying the brakes soon enough to follow through with my initial zealous and positive intent. 👉

I am trying to change my response to the world so I can acclimate to goodness. This is the stage where my CPTSD symptoms don’t vanish and triggers don’t stop coming. But my responses are changing because I am already at the level of structural change.

Are you worth living? Are you worth this life? Loving yourself may be a step too far right now, but maybe, if you have come as far as I have, the self-loathing and repulsion may have abated. And in place of that, there is faith—有自信.

Some cultural critique about this book: I didn’t like large portions of it. It has that polished, American motivational vibe that feels culturally tone-deaf to all of us poor folks in the Third World. It assumes a level of “We Own the World” privilege that ignores systemic barriers. In the end, it leans heavily into the idea that this is all just a way to make more money. Blech.

📚 Books and Being 📚✨ Book reflections from a psychologist & author📖 The Psychology of Money by Morgan HouselAs someone w...
28/03/2026

📚 Books and Being 📚
✨ Book reflections from a psychologist & author
📖 The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel

As someone who observes others’ behavior keenly, what this book says about money as a product of habits rings very true. Often, our parents’ or clans’ habits are passed on unconsciously and then accepted automatically.

Yesterday, I had a client who is an OFW. She is feeling burnt out, but because she wholeheartedly believes that she will be branded a failure kung wala siyang na-pundar before she leaves Europe, she is in a quandary. True, she is likely to be judged by her kin if she does come home not as planned and not as rich. But the prison is largely inside her head. 💬

As a Chinoy, frugality is a baked-in attitude. But my family did not just transmit the pagtitipid mindset; there were moral implications that came with it. I sometimes think the Chinoy gumption for money has a dark side. We love to play with money and talk about money. We even have a Money God. However, we tend to weigh someone’s worth heavily based on their net worth. Such are the plights of Chinoy teens when they tell their parents they want a career in the arts. “Anong kikitain mo diyan?” would be the inevitable question asked.

Right now, as I am parenting teens, this book helped me enrich my understanding of money as a symbol. Giving children money para matuto silang maghawak ng pera is a nod toward my kids’ growing freedom. Unlike my past experience, however, I will accompany my practical money-handling education with relational ethics.

I want them to have a normal sense of entitlement with money. Not restrictive, not grandiose entitlement, but normal entitlement. I want them to demand their worth and not over-apologize or over-explain for their needs and demands. For example, my teen is now charging people for math tutorials. I coached him to stick to his per-session rate and value his time and energy according to the peso signs. 📝

Some families cultivate excessive entitlement, while others produce a restrictive reluctance to claim one’s needs. I aim for the middle. As Lao Tzu advises in Chapter 29 of the Tao Te Ching: “是以聖人去甚,去奢,去泰。”

Avoid extremes, avoid excesses, and walk the middle road. 🌟👉

THE WOUNDED SAGEI fell in love with the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) as a college student. The romance is not yet ...
26/03/2026

THE WOUNDED SAGE
I fell in love with the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) as a college student. The romance is not yet over.

I rekindled my passion for it when I began to feel like a fish out of water in writer-artist circles—and then, after some prodding, I recognized that this same sense of not quite belonging extended to my other professional identity as a therapist.

The MBTI is more popularly known as the 16 Personalities, since taking the test results in one of sixteen types. In my counseling work, I sometimes ask clients to take the online version of this test. This one works. (Link: HERE).

From the beginning, I knew my type was INTJ (Introverted, Intuitive, Thinking, Judging). But when I entered my late twenties, a cousin casually remarked that I could not possibly be introverted, since I was clearly outgoing. From that point on, I assumed I must be ENTJ instead (Extroverted, Intuitive, Thinking, Judging).

Fast forward to my mid-forties, when I began to revisit this whole framework more seriously. I have ChatGPT to thank for helping me realize that I had misunderstood what introversion and extraversion actually mean. Using my discovery as a springboard, I found myself deep-diving into Jungian Cognitive Typology—the psychological system underlying MBTI and the so-called 16 Personalities.

At its core, Jungian typology proposes that every human mind must solve two unavoidable tasks.

The first task leads with answering the question, “How do I take in information?” This is the domain of perception. Some people like me rely primarily on Intuition (N)—patterns, meanings, trajectories, and possibilities. Others rely more on Sensation (S)—facts, details, and lived, concrete reality.
The second task is concerned with answering the question, “How do I decide what to do with that information?” This is the domain of judgment. Some people, like me, predominantly use Thinking (T)—logic, structure, and consequences. Others use Feeling (F)—values, ethics, and human impact.

When you combine these preferences with orientation (introversion vs. extraversion), you arrive at the sixteen types.

Have you figured out which one you are? Do so.

Knowing your type can help you puzzle out why you sometimes are not succeeding as much as you want in your career. It can also make you a better parent, because communication is everything—and different types process information, emotion, and timing very differently.

I write from the perspective of someone who returned to the workforce in her late thirties and early forties, and who often felt out of place in both her professional worlds. And I say this carefully: there are personalities that are better suited to certain jobs, and jobs that implicitly favor certain personalities.

In writing—especially creative writing, journalism, and media—the field tends to reward Feeling-dominant types.

INFPs and ISFPs write from inner emotional truth:

What does this feel like from the inside, honestly and authentically?

ENFJs and ESFJs write with an audience in mind:

How do I express this so others can feel it too?

These writers value emotional authenticity, immediacy, and resonance. They excel at “show, don’t tell.”

Notice that INTJs (me included) do not belong here.

Likewise, in the counseling and psychotherapy professions, decades of studies consistently show that Feeling types dominate—especially INFPs, ENFJs, ISFJs, and, most famously, INFJs, often referred to as the “classic therapist type.”

The field structurally rewards emotional attunement, relational sensitivity, tolerance for ambiguity, and affective presence. In other words, the profession naturally favors Feeling-based cognition.

And once again—INTJs do not belong here either.

No wonder I often felt out of place.

So, if I am an oddball in both fields, then the question became unavoidable: What kind of practitioner am I?

This question led me to the archetypal language of Jungian psychology.
Have you ever heard the term “Wounded Healer”? It describes therapists, or even those in the medical field, who have been through hell, gotten burned, and then healed. Because of that experience, they possess a deeper empathy toward their clients or patients.

When I started my career as a therapist, I thought I would fall easily into this category given my Complex PTSD and anorexia background. But the deeper I went into the work, the clearer it became: I am not very caregiver-like. Even as a mother, I tended toward structure, discipline, and problem-solving rather than emotional soothing.

I care about my clients and I care about my children. But care, for me, expresses itself through clarity, framing, and insight.

That was when I stumbled upon another Jungian archetype: the Sage.
When I read about it, I recognized myself. I now know that I am first a Wounded Sage and second a Wounded Healer.

Here’s the difference:

If the wounded healer’s mantra is “I feel your pain,” the wounded sage’s mantra is often:

“I see what you cannot—and it is a heavy thing to carry.”

As a child, adolescent, and young adult living with trauma, I was profoundly lost. My eating disorder and other problematic behaviors devastated me. But being a thinker, I searched relentlessly for solutions and explanations. I wandered the terrain alone—reading, researching, and exploring psychological theories. Doing a lot of self-inquiry, experimentation.

(Back in the '90s and early 2000s, when I grew up, mental health support for adolescents was not as accessible or accepted as it is now.)

The culmination of my learnings and my personal relative success have got me thinking that maybe, just maybe, I can now help others navigate their way out of their own Black Forest.

My therapeutic style centers on pattern recognition, reframing, naming what is actually happening, and offering conceptual relief. Many clients say I call out bu****it. Well, er, I can be quite blunt. I prefer to think of it as respectful honesty.

(Seriously, softening that edge is an ongoing project.)

In the end, it’s up to you: do you want your therapist direct and to the point, or would you like a gentler approach? Clarity can sting before it heals.

Thinking-oriented clinicians like me often get labeled “too cerebral,” “too distant,” or “too intense.” Yet we are especially effective when clients are stuck in confusion rather than emotional overwhelm.

Take for example, today. I was conversing with the spouse of a person with addiction issues, and what she craved more was orientation and meaning.

Over time, I have learned to complement the style of the Wounded Sage with the kind touch of the Wounded Healer. But one remains primary, the other instrumental—no mistake about that.

A thinker-oriented writer and therapist like me may be atypical, a proverbial misfit in both fields, but what am I to do? Pack up and leave the writing profession? The therapist profession?

No, the answer is simple: Know Thyself. Now that I know my configuration, I can embrace it.

Maybe you should also stop resisting yourself.

Pagod ka na rin mag-panggap, ano?

This year (2026), one of my New Year’s resolutions is to treat my needs as substantial, valid, and real. Developing more confidence in my stance aligns with this: I am learning to work with my design instead of against it.

I am currently writing a book for my clients—something I think of as a map or guidebook. But like all maps, it does not dictate where you’re going. It only suggests possible routes. You don’t blindly trust Waze, right? And you certainly don’t ask it to decide your destination.

As a Wounded Sage, I can often glimpse the probable path to clarity before you do, simply because I have wandered that terrain myself. Unfortunately, it is familiar territory. But the walking is still yours to do. We all live inside our own constructed worlds, and no one else can traverse them for us.

Perhaps it is me you need—not always the one with the kindest face, but the one who carries strong medicine.

Full blog here: https://melanyheger.com/being-a-wounded-sage-as-a-therapist/

✨🧠

📚 Books and Being 📚✨ Book reflections from a psychologist & author📖 A Distant Echo by Val McDermidWho among you here lov...
24/03/2026

📚 Books and Being 📚
✨ Book reflections from a psychologist & author
📖 A Distant Echo by Val McDermid

Who among you here loved and read Nancy Drew novels as a kid? 💖 I did. I devoured every single hardbound copy I could find. They were the rare non-Christian books I saw in our Chinese High School library back in the 90s. If you’re too young to remember—oops. Alam n’yo naman na Tander Cat na ako. 😅

Anyway, the author, Val McDermid, is apparently a modern-day incarnation of Carolyn Keene (credited as the Nancy Drew author). But when I read the About the Author page, I didn’t feel any human touch. I swear not to do this on my next book jacket/cover. All I read in her short bio were awards. 📝

The novel itself is classic Brit crime mystery—Scottish, actually, because there are Scottish references all over it. I’m not from that part of the world, so it’s hard for me to differentiate.

Did I enjoy it? Yes! Why wouldn’t I? First of all, I got it for thirty-five Philippine pesos in my fave secondhand bookstore, Biblio! 🌟 Apart from that, the mystery whodunnit got me reading until the very last pages—just how I like it.

Short answer: the suspect I suspected was the guy who did the crime. I’m still glad I’m sharp enough to guess this. Oh well, maybe I’m not too far gone yet in terms of age-related brain deterioration. 😂 That being said, this Tander Cat will keep on reading and indulging her curiosity—till the next brain fog moment. Haha.

📚 Books and Being 📚✨ Book reflections from a psychologist & author📖 The Lost Symbol by Dan BrownRobert Langdon, the erud...
21/03/2026

📚 Books and Being 📚
✨ Book reflections from a psychologist & author
📖 The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown

Robert Langdon, the erudite professor, strikes again! 🌟 I once had a conversation with an atheist who said it was Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code that got him curious about the mysteries of Christian-based faiths. This book of Brown’s, published the first year I became a mom—and which I read quite late, I may add—is another riff off the old hit. Why fix it if it ain’t broke, yeah?

Mal’akh, the baddie here, tries to kill the professor but ends up in the shredder. Good, he deserved it. The way the author characterized him, I was already seething with disgust in the last few chapters. 💬

No psych-related insights here. This novel is pure drama and antics, like watching Hollywood movies back in the good old 2000s. 📽️

Movies come and go, so do the platforms they are available on. But I know my steadfast source of entertainment will always be books. 📚 To hell if they say it’s outmoded. I know who I am and what I love. 💕

I see my anorexia nervosa as an orchid — like this lovely sanggumay, scientific name: Dendrobium anosmum, with its beaut...
19/03/2026

I see my anorexia nervosa as an orchid — like this lovely sanggumay, scientific name: Dendrobium anosmum, with its beautiful pink flowers. It is my favorite orchid.

I live as a tree that learned to grow with this beautiful but high-maintenance bloom.

I do not want to kill it; it is part of me. I refuse the label “parasite,” which is how some people see an orchid.

In truth, most orchids are epiphytes. They grow on a tree, relying on it for structural support, but they do not leech off it.

In a way, my anorexia lives like a separate entity with my whole person, but not quite. It is me and not-me. I regulate its existence; it does not dictate mine. Without me, the orchid dies—yet I cannot imagine my life without it. This plant is beautiful to look at, but uncompromising in its standards. Get the temperature wrong, and the organism slides rapidly toward decay.

The sanggumay clings to its tree for dear life, an inter-dependent co-existence. The tree? It owns the little pet as its own—wrapping its branches protectively around it.


The clinical truth is that my disease was born out of trauma—specifically, Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (CPTSD). When I was young, my emotionally abusive household forced me into a corner. To survive, I had to pick an obsession—something to control, something to call mine amidst a chaos that was beyond and above me. I was powerless, and anorexia gave me hope.

Fast-forward to now. Do you know one of the biggest reasons I hate having my picture taken? Over the years, I have grown accustomed to the mindless photography of the smartphone era. If you see my photos out there, most are not well-posed. I can tolerate my face, but I hate looking at my body.

In my head, I am an obese woman—a dabyana. Totally disgusting.

The psychological term for this is body dysmorphia.

Fact: I am 40+ kilos.

Delusion: I am 300 + kilos.

I look at the mirror and I cringe. If you had that in your head, you would not like being videoed. Recording yourself with a cam or smartphone in your hand? It is so much like a violation. Like self-harm.

So. I. Don’t.

And I. Won’t.

Not for "likes," not for "subscribes," and not for fear of my voice being obliterated by other content creators.

I have this sanggumay on my branches, and it comes with excess baggage.


When I hit the books to research if I am really worth doing my job as a psychotherapist because of my long-term ailment, I am vindicated.
Several theories explain my stance, but my favorites are Post-Traumatic Growth (PTG) and Polyvagal Theory.

Core researchers Richard Tedeschi and Lawrence Calhoun explain PTG as the idea that "what does not kill you makes you stronger." You do not simply return to who you were before the trauma; if embraced well, you exceed your previous baseline of psychological functioning.

As Haruki Murakami wrote in Kafka on the Shore:
“And once the storm is over, you won't remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won't even be sure, whether the storm is really over.”

In PTG theory, trauma is a developmental accelerator. Nobody wants trauma, but when it happens and there is post-traumatic growth, it is like a “blessing in disguise” or, if you are irreligious like me, you can alternatively say, "Every cloud has a silver lining.”)

PTG theory enumerates five domains, and these apply to my life.

The first of the five domains is new possibilities. My relapse at 37 was the entry point to my midlife crisis and my journey to becoming an author in my 40s. While my father’s abuse instigated the eating disorder, being forged by his fire gave me the will to live.

The second domain is about relating to others. In this area, I know that I have developed deeper compassion and emotional attunement for my clients. However, I still struggle with boundaries. Because my father had untreated narcissistic and bipolar traits, I grew up not knowing where he ended and I began. While some clients become people-pleasers, I became an over-worrier.

The third domain concerns personal strength. The way I rationalize my suffering is this: If I survived my late father's abuse, I can survive anything. I got away. I get to live. Broadly, whenever I am going through something that drives me mental, I recall the harshest of the harsh experiences I have had and say to myself: “Kung yun nga na-survive ko, eh, ito pa kaya? Perspective, Melany, perspective.”

The fourth domain touches on existential clarity. When I relapsed at age 37, I feared I had cancer because of my low immunity and a fungal growth in my throat. I realized then that I am worth fighting for, and there are things I still want to do before I die. I saw how zealously I wanted to be with my kids when they grew up.

Finally, the last domain of PTG is the auditing of our appreciation of life. Even if my father had his shortcomings, I am grateful he was financially responsible. Even if he blocked my childhood dream to be a creative writer, I am grateful to be in this field.

In a way, my papi changed the trajectory for the better.


The Polyvagal Theory of nervous system regulation explains the neural mechanics at work during ongoing trauma, particularly ongoing trauma related to family relationships. Prolonged distress makes it physically difficult for CPTSD survivors to feel safe. It’s easier to distance yourself from what traumatizes you if it is something tangible—a bomb going off, for instance. But emotional violence is more caustic, don’t you think?

As I prescribe grounding and somatic work to my clients, so do I apply it to myself I have been doing yoga (asanas and breath work) since my 20s. It’s been two decades hence and counting. I plan to do headstands as a septuagenarian.

To summarize what you can take away from both PTG and Polyvagal Theory, I can say: “anorexia is a trauma-based survival adaptation mediated by nervous system sensitization.”

But since I fancy myself a little bit as a literary artist, I can also say:
“I am a tree with a sanggumay on my branches. It has been there since I can remember and I see it as part of me.

I do not see life without it. I don't know who I am without it.

I open my arms to protect it from harsh elements and it grows on me, making me
look very pretty and defining me from the rest.

But pretty as it is, there are running costs attached to its existence and upkeep.

Will I breathe easier without it? Sure. Will I be a better tree? I don’t know. What I know is that I have accepted it as being stitched to my side.

There are days it feels like a giant thorn I can do without and there are days it just makes me feel so special.

There is ambivalence hovering over me and my disease. In my mind’s eye, I see this ambivalence as an evanescent mist that sometimes reveals a beautiful woman and sometimes a skeletal, haunted being obsessed with not taking up space.”

Choose whatever works for you. Both statements about my experience with anorexia are true for me.

As I write this, I am grappling with increasing my threshold for being seen and heard in this world. It is a painful growing up process. It’s neural rewiring, and it is correcting faulty behavioral conditioning from childhood. (You can also say I am healing my inner child and inner teenager, if you prefer the lyrical version.) I share these field notes to inspire anyone else facing a seemingly perennial mental struggle.

Do you know that some trees experience structural weight stress and light blockage because of orchids growing on them? That’s me when anorexia expresses its presence too dearly. I feel burdened by it, attacked even. I lose my light too. But then I remember: it is a pet, it is a pet, it is a pet. I have just angered it; I can tame it and then try to smooth its mangled cane-like stems later.

Do you know that another name for the sanggumay is latigo? How very apt—it’s the Filipino word for horsewhip.

Sometimes this orchid can feel like a punishment. But sometimes the pain can help me concentrate, repent, and renew myself.

I just must not overdo the self-flagellation!

Full blog here: https://melanyheger.com/living-with-anorexia-in-middle-age/

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