Temporary Unhappiness
Robert was in his large painting studio when his watch let out a sharp beep, signalling another full hour — eleven o'clock at night. He kept dragging the brush across the canvas, and in those moments he felt genuinely happy. In truth, he was happy only when he was painting. When he wasn't, he wasn't happy at all. He called it "temporary unhappiness1," something brief, something harmless. He could never admit to anyone that he was generally unhappy; he believed he displayed happiness more often than not, even if it wasn't entirely true.
The watch beeped again. By then Robert had already slipped under a blanket on his narrow couch, counting sheep with a kind of dutiful patience. Sleep never came easily. After seven more beeps, he was awake again, staring into the dark. For five minutes he thought about his dead sister, letting her memory settle over him like a thin sheet of cold air. He didn't fight it. He simply waited for the feeling to pass.
"Time to paint," he thought.
"Then paint, man," the canvas thought back.
1 Temporary unhappiness: A self-deception mechanism where chronic depression is reframed as transient episodes. The word "temporary" serves as protective denial—if it's always about to end, you never have to confront its permanence. A linguistic trick that allows one to function while fundamentally unwell.