Man, it took me a long time to realize a lot of the “rules” of the world were invented by me in my own head to mitigate my anxiety. Once I realized how silly some of those mental walls we put up are, I found much more value in myself. This took until maybe college-age for me to realize. College in terms of a degree may be not the most useful thing in todays day and age but just the perspective it gave me regarding how big and diverse the world and people actually are, things that used to be huge and defining for me, like my stutter, became just an element of who I am and how I live. Not the definition.