When there’s nothing you’re hiding, there’s nothing that can find you.

Most of the fear of being found out is not about the thing itself. It is about the distance between the story you have told and what is true, and that distance is what somebody else can hold over you. Close it and there is nothing left to threaten, which turns into a strange kind of calm.

Think of the one thing you would hate to have discovered and ask what closing that gap would take. Sometimes it means telling one person before they hear it somewhere else. Sometimes it just means stopping. Either way, going first takes the weapon out of everyone else’s hands.