Perfect Vulnerability: Melanie’s World
[updated October, 2025]
Melanie’s World
My friend Melanie celebrated her thirty-second birthday. Melanie has cerebral palsy. When she was twelve, her doctors didn’t think she would live past her teens. For the first eighteen years of her life, her mother cared for her at home with the help of a series of caregivers who fed her, bathed her, changed her, carried her from bed to wheelchair to bath and back.
In thirty-two years, Melanie hasn’t spoken a single word. She cannot hold up her head or hold a spoon with her hands. She is petite, with bird-bone wrists and slender fingers. When she smiles, I see her grandmother and mother in the curl of her mouth, in the tiny wrinkles in her forehead.
She loves music, and is a regular at the local blues club, where staff and customers call out her name in glad greeting when she and her caregiver arrive. She loves being immersed in the warm waters of the community pool. Everywhere she goes, she has friends who delight in her.
Melanie doesn’t speak. Yet her ability to create through the power of relationship is astonishing. And her communication skills are exquisitely sophisticated. She communicates in images and feeling states. Much the way Devas communicate, she shares a portion of her vibrational field with me so that, for the duration of our conversation, I experience the world as she does.
Slow down! I’ve said to her, more than once. You’re going too fast — I’m missing half of what you show me. Listening to her is, in some ways, like listening to someone speak a foreign language; one which I understand but in which I am not fluent. It takes effort. It can be exhausting. And exhilarating.
She uses capacities that all of us have within us, as seeds or potentials, because they are capacities of our soul. Yet most of us haven’t developed the kind of skill and sophistication that Melanie has. Her skill with energy technologies offers a glimpse of our species’ future — she embodies qualities of communication and consciousness that the rest of us are still blundering toward with the clumsiness of toddlers.
Since she doesn’t use language in the ways we do – either to obscure or to illuminate – her presence is her message. The qualities of her being are highly refined, distilled, intensified by her lack of speech. In her presence, you feel what she’s feeling; you experience her inner state without veils, projections or hidden agendas.
The flip side of Melanie’s sophistication with subtle energies is her sensitivity to her environment. Her energy field is diffuse, her boundaries transparent. She feels whatever the people around her are feeling, and any incoherency, turbulence or lack of integration in her environment can be intensely painful for her.
Being highly sensitive myself, I understand something of what this means for her on a day-to-day basis. Engaging with other people can be joyous or debilitating, depending on their inner state. For many years now, she has created people and situations around her that nurture peace and comfort, love and delight. Her long-time caregiver has a young family — teens who have grown up with Melanie, who adore her, for whom she is Aunty Mel.
She is patient with the gap between her reality and theirs. She is patient with herself, with her always-painful body. Her perspective is both more immediate and more spacious than most of us can manage. She inhabits a different part of the continuum of being than many of us do — without the intervening skins and masks that bind and protect us.
It’s a liberating way to live. The power of perfect vulnerability.