When you struggle with a disorder of any sort, be it physical or mental, the process of acceptance can be stubbornly blocked by implacable fear. Fear of what others will think of you, fear of how the knowledge will change their perception of you; fear of how it will change your perception ofyourself. This block, I think, can sometimes be caused by our fear of the clinical aspect of our struggle. We have been diagnosed. Someone has – as we might disproportionately think – put their signature to the fact that there is something wrong with us. And somewhere between the relief of getting answers and the space where we absorb this new understanding of ourselves is the fearful voice saying we have to keep this secret. Because to keep that part of yourself secret is to keep yourself safe; to make that newly discovered vulnerability as less vulnerable as possible. But as it happens, sometimes the process of harboring that vulnerability makes things worse. Good intentions become fear-based intentions. And as we scramble to keep our vulnerable secret we end up manifesting a whole bunch of unhealthy habits, behaviors, and attitudes along the way. With every protective step we validate what we mistakenly feared from the start: that there’s something wrong with us. We’re so busy protecting ourselves from the rest of the world that we don’t stop to think about protecting ourselves from our own reactions, our own behavior.

That, in a nutshell, is my story. A bit backwards, but I wound up in that place of being stifled by fear, which seems increasingly common. By the time I was six years old I developed the nervous habit of biting my tongue; before I was seven I bit so hard and so often that I punctured it. It was that early on in my life that I was saddled with the vulnerability: the diagnosis – only, I was too young to know or care what it meant. So I went along in my childhood with my nervous habits, bolstered by one of the most supportive families you could imagine and anchored by my natural introversion, my aptitude for creativity and play. But as I grew into a grown-up mind I grew into a grown-up awareness. I shouldered the grown-up misconception that vulnerabilities are safest when they’re kept locked away, when they’re kept reminded of their status as “weakness”. Now, though, I’ve come to understand the fatal flaw in that practice. It encourages fear – avoidance, shame, all the weighty struggles – and it manifests the perception of not being good enough.

This year, I’ve been on a journey to relearn my grown-up mindset and to correct the mistakes that my fear made in its attempts to do its job (keeping me safe). I stopped smothering the vulnerability; I faced, for the first time as an adult, the clinical aspect of how my anxiety had grown and what it had bred, and I’ve begun reshaping a clinical vulnerability into a vital truth. My vital truth is that I have severe social anxiety. It crippled me, but I’m learning to thrive.

The perceived nature of vulnerabilities is that they’re weaknesses, but I think that’s wrong. I think sometimes what makes us vulnerable is our greatest source of strength, because it teaches us strong things: like courage and how to love and what it takes to be kind. I’m grateful for my vulnerability because it’s put me on a path of learning self-compassion, gentleness, and living from a place of simple grace. It’s been the motivation to develop practices that let me connect to life in ways I never would have imagined. Even though it can sometimes be hard to leave the house and it’s always hard to make eye contact with strangers; even though at twenty-six big achievements can sometimes be seemingly small things like driving a car or making a phone call; even though it’s easy to feel stunted and fearful and embarrassed, the practices of learning to live in love rather than fear have made me feel just as in-touch with – and part of – the beauty of life as someone who travels the world.

These practices are, collectively, the process of nurturing the courage that was born within and encouraging it to grow large enough to someday become a place to dwell, a place to make decisions from. For me, as for so many people, that’s the journey. And the first step is to embrace our vital, vulnerable truths.

Yesterday the world celebrated what would have been Audrey Hepburn’s 85th birthday, and as I spent some time thinking about Audrey’s impact on my life it was, as it always is, a bit of a remarkable and moving experience to recall the many different lessons she’s managed to teach me through her legacy. Some lessons she’s still trying to get me to understand, while others I feel are well-traveled ideas that I keep close to my heart.

She taught me to be unexpected, and particularly to never be swayed by others when your personal path leads in a perhaps unpopular direction. She was a celebrity smash, her name working magic on ticket sales, but she stepped away from films in favor of spending more time with her children. Despite having rocked the fashion world with cigarette pants, ballet flats, and a certain Parisian minimalism she explored wild and wonderfully excessive style aesthetics in her later years. The gamine little European girl evolved into a worldly, spirited woman who had no qualms about donning a crimson feather boa or doing an extravagant cat-eye. Being arguably one of the biggest style icons the world has ever seen, she could have let that define her for the rest of her life, but she didn’t. And despite being a coveted muse, a top fashion insider, and a monumentally famous celebrity, she put it all in its place to lend a helping hand for desperate children in the developing world. One thing I’ve always understood from her is that you have to follow where your spirit leads you, wherever that will be and regardless of what it offers you in return.

She taught me to be a citizen of the world. Belgian-born to a British father and a Dutch mother, she spent her childhood in Holland and lived throughout Europe, from England to Rome and eventually her beloved Switzerland. Her UNICEF work took her across Africa, Asia, and Central and South America. She was fluent in six languages. There was, of course, her very French style inclination, and her very Italian devotion to pasta. When her first son was born she said, “I would like Sean to mix with all kinds of people in all countries so that he will learn what the world is all about. He should take his own small part in making the world a better place.” I’ve always loved the openness with which Audrey viewed the world, as a sort of collective humanity. To me she promoted an idea that you should remember yourself as a part of the bigger picture – and to help out, to contribute to the bigger picture as much as you can, and to understand the equality of humanity in that aspect. John Isaac said, “Audrey had no race, no color”. She had a way of appearing universal in part, I think, because she supported everyone; she valued everyone.

She taught me that no matter how much you long for strength in certain areas of your life, your faults and struggles will never be erased. It’s a matter of simple perseverance in the face of challenge. You won’t suddenly be what you want to be – instead, you’ll be something you never would have expected, and somehow you’ll learn to understand and to love that person despite everything. My understanding is that she was shockingly insecure, maybe a bit of a perfectionist for herself, and she had a lifetime of frightening experiences from the war that followed her throughout her life. She was prone even to bouts of self-loathing, and having to handle something like that with the sort of limelight she found thrust on her must have been staggering. Everyone wanted to be Audrey Hepburn, and she considered herself to be not nearly as Audrey Hepburn-ish as the ideal that was based on her. But I think if there’s one bit of wisdom she would always pass down (besides “Be kind”) it would have been that you mustn’t waste time worrying about what doesn’t matter. Of her own insecurities she learned to live with them, as she said, “by adopting a forceful, concentrated drive.” What I saw in her later years was the image of a woman secure in her purpose and determined in her hopefulness; rather than fixing the perceived flaws there was suddenly more of an understanding that this skin she was living in was hers, and however imperfect it might seem to her it was still a body that could lend a hand, that could take action and make a change. In the face of that, a crooked smile doesn’t seem like a very powerful thing at all.