What the heretical heart actually means

And why I built a business around it

I was sitting in a Starbucks parking lot crying into a chai I didn’t know how to drink alone anymore.

My husband had offered me the afternoon off. Time to myself, time to go connect with a friend, go shopping, just go be a person outside of mom and wife for a few hours. A gift. A genuinely loving gift.

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I had stood in my closet for ten minutes staring at jeans and sweatshirts thinking: this is not who I have ever been. Where did the color go. Where did the weird and funky go. I had edited it all out so slowly I hadn’t even noticed until I was standing there in a closet that belonged to someone bland and wondering whose clothes these were.

I drove through the Starbucks drive-through because going inside alone felt like too much. It wasn’t really about being alone in public. It was that I didn’t know what to do with my physical body when nobody needed anything from it. No child to keep track of, no small person to keep safe, nobody requiring anything from me at all. My body had forgotten how to just exist without being needed. I had spent the last four years with children attached to me and somewhere in that time I had lost the thread back to myself entirely.

I pulled into the parking lot with my chai and I thought: Okay. Now what? Where do I go? What do I like to do?

I didn’t know.

I didn’t have a favorite store. A favorite place. A favorite anything. We were new to the town we lived in and I didn’t know many people yet, but that wasn’t really the problem. The problem was that even if I’d had somewhere to go, I wasn’t sure who would be showing up. I had become so good at being everything to everyone else that I had no idea what I wanted for myself anymore.

I drove home after about an hour. In tears. Not because something terrible had happened, but because I couldn’t answer the simplest question a person can ask themselves.

What do I want right now?

That was the quiet before the storm. A few months later my body decided to make the invisible visible in a way I could not ignore.

I was 32 years old when I had my first panic attack.

An unexpected phone call. My dad was arriving a day earlier than planned. That was it. That was the thing that pushed me over the edge—the threshold—my threshold. A phone call about a schedule change sent me into a full-blown panic attack, and once they started they did not want to stop.

I went to the doctor. Ruled out the big scary things. Thought I was having a heart attack. Turns out, I was not. What I was having was a full-body revolt. My adrenals were so depleted I couldn’t stand up without seeing stars for twenty to thirty seconds. I couldn’t walk from my bedroom to the kitchen without my vision going completely black. Not dark at the edges. Gone. Feeling my way down the hallway with my hands on the walls.

My body had been keeping score the entire time I was busy trying to be “good”.

Good mom. Good wife. Good daughter. Good friend. I had moved away from where my family lived and taken on the silent message that if I wasn’t going to be near them, I would have to figure out how to do all of this without help. So I became hyper-independent. Controlling everything I could because so much of life felt out of control and it felt like it was on me to hold it all together. I had spent years grinding myself down to fit every container someone else had decided I belonged in, and I had done it so thoroughly that I had basically disappeared. My body, which had been sending quieter signals for a long time that I kept overriding, finally just took me down.

The doctor offered me a daily medication to prevent the panic attacks. I didn’t know what else to do, so I said yes. I sat in the parking lot of the pharmacy with the script filled and took the first pill.

That night I couldn’t sleep. My kids and my husband were asleep, and I was alone with my thoughts after indulging in a coffee I shouldn’t have had after two weeks of zero caffeine—after a summer of relying on it. Earlier that day, for just a few hours, that coffee had given me a glimpse of something I hadn’t felt in months—maybe years. Energy. The kind where you feel like yourself, where you could actually play with your kids, where your body felt like it belonged to you again. It didn’t last. But I felt it, and I recognized it, and I wasn’t willing to forget what it had felt like.

Somewhere in the middle of that sleepless night something cracked open a little further. Not in a bad way—in a necessary way.

I thought: a series of choices got me here. Which means I can make different choices that get me somewhere else. A medication would mask the symptoms. It would not change a single thing about the life that had produced them.

The next morning I threw the pills away and decided to find another way. (this is not to throw shade at anyone for taking the meds. I just knew that they weren’t the thing that was going to help me in this moment.)

Self-portrait | © 2002 Aypril Porter

That decision was the first truly heretical thing I had done in years.

Not heretical because it was reckless. Heretical because it was mine. Because I made it from the inside out instead of from the outside in. Because it was what I actually believed instead of what I was supposed to do.

I had been making outside-in decisions for so long I had forgotten what an inside-out one felt like.

I reached out to a naturopath. Changed my diet. Started moving my body again, for me. And slowly, almost accidentally, I started reaching for small pieces of myself. I got back into photography. Found a local friend who liked to take photos for fun. Grabbed onto one tiny fragment of who I used to be and held on.

That fragment grew. My own health journey became an obsession with understanding the body, which led me into nutrition school and then six years of working in that field. And somewhere in those six years I hit a wall. I could tell my clients exactly what to eat (or not) and they still weren’t making the changes that would last—because the issue was never information. The issue was always identity.

Who do you have to become to live differently?

What do you have to stop performing?

What do you have to be willing to lose?

Those questions sent me into a ten-month live coaching training in 2020, where I gave and received over a hundred hours of coaching while the whole world was in lockdown processing everything at once. That year cracked me open the rest of the way.

And Human Design, which had come into my world back in 2015, became the language that finally gave me a map back to myself. Not a prescription. Not a personality test. A mirror. One that showed me who I actually was underneath everything I had been performing, and gave me permission to stop apologizing for it.

Everything I have built since has come from that combination: the coaching that cracked me open and the Human Design that named what was inside.

Here is what I know now that I wish I had known then.

The parking lot wasn’t a low point. It was a message. My inside was trying to show up on my outside and had nowhere to go because I had spent years making sure the outside stayed neat and acceptable and non-threatening to everyone around me.

The panic attacks weren’t a breakdown. They were the first honest thing my nervous system had done in years.

And the woman who threw those pills away and decided to find another way? That was my heretical heart waking up. The part of me that knew, even when I had no evidence and no plan, that there had to be another way because this way was killing me.

The heretical heart is not a brand concept. It is not a vibe. It is the part of you that refuses, even at great cost, to keep performing a version of yourself that was designed to make other people comfortable.

It is the inside showing up on the outside. The truth that lives below the performance. The knowing you have been sitting on because you learned very young that who you actually were was inconvenient, too much, too weird, too loud, too quiet, too something.

If you are reading this and something in your chest just moved, I am probably talking about you.

You are the one who has always known something other people weren’t ready to hear. You have spent years either hiding it or getting punished for it. You have a closet full of safe choices and a quiet grief about the color you edited out. Your body has been sending signals you keep overriding. You have sat in your own version of that parking lot and driven home without an answer.

You are not lost. There is nothing wrong with you. You are a heretic living in a world that keeps trying to make you ordinary, and it is exhausting, and you are tired of doing it alone.

That is exactly why I built this.

Not to hand you a framework and call it freedom. Not to give you a prettier performance to put on. To sit across from you in the fire of becoming and help you make the invisible visible. To use Human Design as the language that names what you have always known about yourself but couldn’t quite say out loud.

The heretical heart is integrity. It is the non-negotiable. It is the thing that blows up anything that isn’t real, that cannot sustain a lie for long, that will drag you back to yourself even when you are trying very hard to be what everyone else needs you to be.

You already have one. You have probably been paying the price for it your whole life.

I am here to help you stop paying and start building with it instead.

When did you first cover her up?