I heard this “relationship advice” a bajillion times growing up: “Jorge, you’re too straightforward and authentic in your relationships. Many people don’t like you because you say what’s on your mind instead of being diplomatic. Also don’t talk about your feelings. You’re a man. Don’t show your vulnerability. People see it as weakness, and it repels them.”

As I got older, this rhetoric took on a milder form: “Don’t be too vulnerable with people too soon. You should only be vulnerable with people you trust.”

Well, what do “too vulnerable” and “too soon” specifically mean? Where is the “normal” vulnerability threshold? Am I “too vulnerable” in your judgment because my vulnerability skills are better than yours? Last but not least, how can I know who to trust without being vulnerable with them first? Horseshit.

So yeah, I was conditioned to be ashamed of talking to others (friends and family included) about how I really felt and about what I was really going through on the inside. I was taught to keep my relationships superficial and diplomatic and never brave real connection with people. I was taught to never directly say what’s on my mind if it made others uncomfortable and to never stand up for what I believe in front of people who had power over and formal authority. This operating system of fitting in and giving up on my truth to please others (specifically, those in positions of privilege) was running on the frontend of my life for the majority of it.

And what was happening on its backend? In my heart and soul? Of course, excrucuating loneliness, shame, and disconnection. No, it wasn’t suffering out of weakeness. Mine was a lion heart. No matter how much bullshit was being fed to it by the culture, it refused to believe that vulnerability was weakness. That authenticity made me unlovable. That I should stay quiet about the truth and not make people uncomfortable. That fitting in and pleasing others could actually lead to building successful, effective, meaningful relationships. Long before discovering the work of Brené Brown, I had known deep down in my heart that vulnerability is courage, not weakness. And my heart demanded that I seek to find and build relationships with people who also realize it and live by it. Wholehearted people, as Brené Brown calls them.

There were almost no such people in my social and professional circles. I haven’t met many of them anywhere in Russia, for that matter, through my entire life lived here. But as soon as my cultural horizons were expanded by my first trip to Spain, my lion heart reclaimed its rightful ownership over my life. My spiritual awakening got kickstarted. I realized that despite my hugely disadvantaged circumstances and against oherwhelming odds, I had to bring about a revolution in my life. I had to move to a different country – my real home country, the country where I belonged, not the oppressed country where I’d been born and grew up. I had to start a totally different career. I had to adopt a new language and build new relationships in a culture where wholeheartedness, creativity, and vulnerability were honored, not penalized, and where tons of armor I’d been lugging around for years were neither required nor rewarded. Most importantly, I had to change my operating system and unlearn all the toxic bullshit about vulnerability that I’d been inculcated with over the years.

Given that I stayed in the same country and the culture of oppression as before, deinstalling my old operating system met enormous resistance. Not from within, but from without. As much as I finally started loving and accepting myself, Russia as a culture wouldn’t accept me for who I was. There was ‘too much’ courage, ‘too much’ honesty, ‘too loud’ of a mouth, and ‘too much’ empathy in me. Too lion of a heart, in one word.

Still, I went on to honor my values, to reclaim my authenticity and vulberability even in that hostile environment because of a simple reason – it became my new job requirement. Writing my book, a love story set in Spain, I had to live the journeys of my protagonists along with them. I had to unlearn my emotional ignorance and reconnect with what I’d been conditioned to suppress within myself for so long, in order to be creatively productive.

It was through writing my book and two episodes of clinical depression that interrupted it that I eventually migrated to a new operating system – by the ripe old age of 27. With Brené Brown’s research fortifying my mental growth, I learned to practice relational vulnerability maintaining dignity and authenticity without getting sabotaged by shame. As a consequence, I had to let go of most of my previous relationships and transform those that remained. I finally realized – in crystal clarity and in high definition – how my vulberability was the only way not just for me to actualize my gifts, but also to serve the world in the most meaningful way I could – with my creative work.
On my path of reclaiming vulnerability, I did make mistakes, but then again, thd newly gained shame resilience didn’t allow those mistakes to stop me on the path I knew was the right one. Now, with my book finished, I had to reach out to people in America who could help me get this project off the ground. Yes, it wasn’t the kind of book I could reasonably self-publish – and not just because regardless of my creative talents I was a poor guy in a third-world country, with no prospect of getting out of poverty despite a university degree. But mainly, because this book broached fat too many complex social and political issues – from corruption to homophobia to mental health stigma to medical malpractice – and in order to find its target audience, it needed to not just be published but promoted in a way that required certain connections and publicity.

By the nature of this enterprise, all those people I reached out and built relationships with were very privileged American people. Yes, I chose them because they portrayed as equality champions and social justice advocates – allegedly sharing my values. I never forced those relationships. I didn’t floodlight them with my vulnerability, telling my darkest stories on the third day of knowing them. Instead, I allowed those friendships to develop in a natural, gradual, boundaried way over time. And yes, I did believe in their integrity before I got the evidence of the opposite.

The hard thing is, I invariably got such evidence in the end. After investing lots of time (and God only knows how much hope) into those relationships, after building an appropriate degree of trust with them, after seeing their vulnerabilities and responding empathetically, and after having them thank me for my meaningful support – the shitshow started anyway the moment I showed my vulnerability. The moment I asked for help with my book’s project. The moment I revealed my disadvantaged socioeconomic circumstsances, not readily visible through my Instagram page. In other words, as soon as we arrived at the relationship stage that required them to practice the values they’d so passionately professed, those values evaporated. They chickened out of the conversation, gaslighted me, employed passive aggression or overt humiliation, but anyway I got rejected the very moment I opened up. What a familiar lesson from my childhood! Except that now, with Brené Brown providing lifetime support for my operating system, I didn’t start thinking that something was wrong with me. As much as those people traumatized me with their cowardice, hypocrisy, and greed, I didn’t start making up stories about my personal worth or my artistic legitimacy. Instead, every time, with increasing clarity I realized this basic relationship principle: the moment you really get vulnerable with people – not fake or use vulnerability as a manipulation, but really get vulnerable – people show you their true colors too, whether they’re aware of it or not. And, as Maya Angelou said, when people show you their true colors, you’d better believe them the first time. Don’t offer your vulnerability again to those who treat it like garbage – because then, without boundaries, it stops being real vulnerability.

Obviously, my story, my talent, and my request for help confronted those people about their unexplored privilege – and their hypocrisy didn’t take long to show up. But even more, my authenticity and courage (a.k.a. vulnerability) effectively reminded them of their lack of those skills – not much needed in their privileged lives, actually, but still important and valuable. Just like my down-home, no-fake-smiles relational approach stood in contrast with their shallow high society ‘friendships’, celebrity cocktail parties, and the culture of fitting in and saying whatever makes them look good at the moment – including talking about social justice and other things in public that in real life they don’t give a shit about.

So one of the things I’m most proud of in my journey is that despite all the privilege, connections, and access those people had, despite the huge difference their right choices could have made for my life and my career, I don’t regret losing them. What they did to me unambiguously proved that their subconscious need for comfort was bigger than their conscious respect for truth. And such people are indeed dangerous. They are a no-win for meaningful, effective relationships of any kind. They are manipulative, abusive, and unrealible. Those people are only fit for cocktail parties, shirtless selfies, Hollywood-style friendships, and luxury resort hookups. None of them actually deserved to represent my work dealing with intersectional social justice, no matter who they portrayed themselves to be.

These days, I’ve incorporated this imprortant lesson into my personal relationships as well. If my vulnerability pisses someone off, I suggest politely — to be honest, more often brutally — that they get the fuck out of my life. I cut off people who perceive my vulnerability as a license to take advantage of me. I walk away from those who judge me for communicating how I feel. I remove people who make me doubt my sanity, my worth, and my lived experiences. I have zero tolerance for passive aggression, cynicism, and cheap-seats criticism. I call bullshit on rhetoric that tries to stuff me into stereotyped boxes of gender, class, ethnicity, or religion – and makes me orphan parts of me that don’t fit in there.

Yes, despite all my work and daring efforts, my life still hasn’t seen the radical change it deserves, and given my worsening health issues without access to healthcare where I live, I have no idea how much time I have left. The circumstances I was born into, after all, intersectionally set me up to not succeed. But I keep daring greatly. Mine is a lion heart. I don’t give up on my dreams no matter how many failures and setbacks I faced and how much trauma drags me back. I stay in the arena and keep doing my thing, telling my story, seeking opportunity to leverage my gifts to serve the world. I keep living the vision of who I’ve always known I am. Real courage, you see, is not a victory march. It’s a cold and broken hallelujah, as Leonard Cohen wrote in his beautiful song. And unlike my 25 y.o. self, the one thing I know today is that coming to the end of my life, I will still be in the arena, speaking and living my truth as an artist. I will know that, although quite late, but in the end I did break free from the oppression I’d been conditioned to see as inevitable and immutable, and started forging my own path, towards my white dreams, with my bare feet and my wild, lion heart.

So next time you get rejected, ridiculed, or scapegoated for your vulnerability, listen the voice within, not the voices without. Listen to your wild, lion heart, roaring the truth no matter how big of a wound it got. Listen to what it says about your values, your intentions, and your worth. And stop negotiating those things with people who have unearned advantages over you, huge as those might be. No one deserves to be able to take away your truth. Remember to take care of it.