Happy: Why More or Less Everything is Absolutely Fine

by Derren Brown

If you have something to ‘come out’ about, come out. If you carry a secret around with you, you learn to protect it in all sorts of ways that disconnect you from the rest of the world and the people in it. Meanwhile, the idea of your secret being discovered will come to fill you with horror. But the huge deal you have turned it into is not a reflection of how big a deal it is in the eyes of other people. To them, it’s just some information about you. Generally speaking, they don’t care. They’re far more likely to care if you’re happy, and they’ll certainly care if you’re obviously hiding something (and it will be obvious), but they are unlikely to care about the thing itself (if it doesn’t affect them). They don’t think about you and what you get up to as much as you think they do. And when you come out, the bubble you have built around you bursts, and life suddenly becomes so much more delightful: it’s like you’ve put down a heavy bag of rocks. You also realise that everyone else has his or her heavy bag of rocks, too. And you gain a much healthier perspective regarding how much people care about what you get up to. You’ll never regret falling in love. Do so over and over again. Lower your standards if necessary. It might lead to heartbreak now and then, but it’ll always be worth it in the end. If you work in a creative field, and you are faced with a choice of doing a job for the money or doing a job for the fun of it, take the fun one whenever you can. You’ll rarely enj...