A Harry Potter book she was too embarrassed to buy for three days

Gretchen Rubin was elected to the Council on Foreign Relations around the same time she started a small book group devoted entirely to children's literature. One of these was, by any conventional measure, the more prestigious achievement. The other was the one that actually made her happy and gave her new friends. Which group brought me more pleasure, she asked herself afterward. Kidlit.

She'd spent years quietly hiding this particular passion. She loved Tolkien, loved the moral clarity of stories where good visibly triumphs over evil, loved books she felt were somehow not serious enough for a grown woman with a law degree. The embarrassment ran deep enough that when a new Harry Potter book came out, she didn't buy it for several days, pretending even to herself that she didn't care. It took a lunch with a literary agent, who confessed her own obsession with the series, for Rubin to admit she felt the same way, and to realize she likely knew several other adults hiding the same enthusiasm, simply because none of them had said so out loud.

This became one application of what she called her First Commandment: Be Gretchen. Not the version of herself she wished existed, who enjoyed pedicures, chess, and hot new restaurants, but the actual person who found genuine energy in rereading The Phantom Tollbooth for the fifteenth time. She developed a rough test for telling real fun from performed fun: did she look forward to it, did it energize her rather than drain her, and did she feel free of guilt afterward. Things that failed the test, no matter how sophisticated they looked from outside, she let go of. Things that passed, no matter how unglamorous, she stopped apologizing for.

There was a cost to this honesty, which she didn't pretend away. Accepting what actually interested her meant accepting a long list of things she would never be: not a jazz club regular, not an adventurous eater, not someone with a chic evening life. But the alternative, chasing fun that belonged to other people, had never once made her happier, only more tired and more convinced that something was wrong with her for not enjoying it.

Start by making an honest, unglamorous list of what you actually look forward to doing, separate from the list of things you feel you ought to enjoy. Run each item on both lists through a simple check: does it energize you rather than drain you, and do you feel any guilt about it afterward. Think back to something you loved as a child that you quietly dropped because it seemed too young or too uncool for who you're supposed to be now, and consider picking it back up. Then say the unglamorous interest out loud to one other person this week, and notice how often they turn out to share it. Let go, without apology, of the version of fun you've been performing for an audience that was never actually watching.