Anchored to my bed by decomposing limbs, fusing to the sad sheets like moss clinging to bark, I scroll through Instagram. The artificial glow of my phone is acid to my eyes. I stayed up again.

My limbs are soggy, full of water. I remember being told in swimming class that to tread water more easily, you need to take off your heavy, sopping clothes. I want to peel them off and feel the cool water on my free, naked body, to dive down and retrieve the brick. Everyone is telling me to peel them off because I am drowning. I am drowning myself and it is my fault.

But I would rip my skin off raw. So I stay in bed.

I keep scrolling, in a trance like state. A pretty quote: “happiness is a choice”. Through this little device, I peer into the realm of people that are ‘happy’. Unequivocally, unqualifiedly, absolutely happy.

When someone tells you that their goal in life is ‘to be happy’, it is a refreshingly simple answer to an overwhelmingly complicated question. It appears as warm and humble against what can seem like a cold and selfish backdrop. But its simplicity is frustrating. What does it mean to be happy?

When someone asks you the question: ‘are you happy?’ you’re supposed to say yes. Yes is the correct answer. To tell someone that you are not happy is read as telling someone that you have a problem that needs to be solved. In an online culture of documenting plastic smiles and ‘live, laugh love’ quotes, ‘I am not happy’ is a controversial statement.

But I’m not. I am not happy.

Not in the sense that I experience happiness as an enduring, unwavering feeling.  I have been happy, I will be happy again and I sincerely hope that you will be too. Presented as the pure, ideal to be reached, ‘happiness’ seems to be a state of being that we collectively perform online. It seems that on social media, we’re all singing “if you’re happy and you know it clap your hands” as loud as we can.

I keep scrolling. Another pretty message: “I’ve got 99 problems and they all involve carbs”.

With self-improvement being the mantra, the implicit message is that we can choose to be happy- if we just ate less bread. I can feel tonight's binge sitting uncomfortably, toxically in my stomach: I’d be happier if I didn’t eat that. Happiness seems to be the collective goal and juice cleanses are how we get there. Happiness is a sickly cocktail of Quinoa and avocado that only the rich can afford to experience. If happiness is a choice easily made through avoiding bread like it’s poisonous, then it’s your own fault if you’re miserable.

But it’s not that simple. Reducing emotional fulfilment to this equation is ironically tormenting. If you’re not 100 per cent happy, 100 per cent of the time, you’re made to feel weird. You wonder what is wrong with you. ‘live, laugh love’ as a mantra is a taunting lie.

What an obsession with documenting self-improvement indicates to me is a gaping hole of potential, a void of inadequacy. Where is this golden, pure happiness that everyone seems to be reaching for? What even is it? I don’t believe it is tangible and I don’t believe it’s helpful to pretend that it is. Emotions are complex: a kaleidoscope, a firework display, a nebula that we’re yet to understand. What makes them valuable is that none of them are exactly the same. To appreciate them, our eyes need a background or a contrast. We never can, and never will experience one emotion — ‘happiness’ or any other — completely uninterrupted, forever. We’d become numb. In suggesting that we can, we’re reaching for something that isn’t there — we’re grabbing at thin air.

So why do we confine experiences of fulfilment to a single word? I want to feel excited, scared, tiny against the universe, pensive, alarmed, angry, motivated, and reflective. I want to feel light, then dark, then light again. I want to feel so many things that can never be swallowed in a multi-vitamin tablet.

The idea of ‘happiness’ is so vague that it is empty, being filled by advertisers with waist trainers and detox kits. ‘Happiness’ is plastic and it is being marketed to us through unhealthy and punishing ‘wellness’ regimes.

So, telling someone that you’re not happy shouldn’t be controversial. It shouldn’t make you feel  alien, or like you are asking them for something. I’m not happy and that’s OK. To be absolutely, 100 per cent happy forever would also be to feel that nothing is wrong with the world, that nothing needs changing. In this way, ‘happiness’ as an ideal state is arguably inherently conservative. Instagram will have you believe that everything is in perfect order when you eat a kale salad. Except it’s not. This isn’t supposed to be nihilistic or existentialist: I think there is an exciting hope in the capacity for change that anger galvanises. It is important to be angry. The saying that 'if you’re not angry, you’re not paying attention' holds true for me.

The idea of pure happiness is overrated. You can’t choose how you feel. You don’t choose to have depression or anxiety in the same way that you don’t directly choose to have a physical illness. The idea that you should aim for a constant, static state of happiness needs to be challenged. We need to normalise the idea that emotions are like a cardiograph: if you see a straight line, it means you’re dead