Euthymic
Shifting to Neutral
There’s a word in your therapy notes that you’ll never hear out loud. It sits between the date stamp and the billing code, tucked inside a paragraph you were never supposed to read. Euthymic. The first time I saw it, I looked it up. Stable mood. Absence of disturbance. The clinical equivalent of a green light on a dashboard. Everything nominal, nothing to report.
I thought it was a win.
I thought it meant I was passing.
Passing. Not healing. Not better. Passing. I had become so fluent in the language of okay that a trained professional wrote it down as fact. And why wouldn’t they? I showed up. I spoke in complete sentences. I made eye contact. I described my feelings using the vocabulary they gave me. I performed the exercises. I trained the muscle.
They tell you that’s how it works. Cognitive behavioral therapy is built on a premise that sounds like a dare: practice the thought pattern long enough and it becomes real. Fake it until you make it, but with a copay. And I was good at it. I was exceptional. What nobody tells you is that the exact skill set that lets you survive a thing is the one that lets you pretend it never happened. The mechanism is identical. The chart can’t tell the difference.
A therapist once asked me when the last time I felt happy was. I’m thirty-five. And I could not answer her. Not because I’ve never been happy. I must have been, statistically. But I am not familiar enough with the feeling to identify it in a lineup. I know what it’s supposed to look like. I’ve performed it convincingly. But the real thing, the transient, unmanufactured experience of joy, those moments are so rare and so brief that they feel like artifacts. Glitches in a system that wasn’t designed to produce them.
Here is what I know instead: routine. I wake up. I take the dog to daycare. I drive to work. I manage fifty sites and seven hundred users. I come home. I watch a movie. I go to bed. I do enough routine maintenance that my engine doesn’t blow. Some people would call this a win. My chart would call it euthymic. I call it idle. The engine running just above the threshold of failure, producing nothing, going nowhere, but operational. Operational is the goal.
The deal I made, the one nobody told me I was making, is that I’d give up the highs to avoid the lows. And it worked. I’m functional. I provide. I show up. I coach my son’s flag football team. I drive to six stores on a Saturday looking for a thousand-dollar Pokémon card because he won’t stop talking about it and I cannot say no to my children because every no feels like confirmation that I am not enough.
My nine-year-old texted me at six o’clock on a Thursday. Dad, can you find me a suit? I want to wear a suit to school tomorrow. And I wanted to move heaven and earth. I wanted to be the person who delivers. But you can’t buy a suit at six PM on a Thursday. Suits are measured, fitted, hemmed. It takes days. I told him that. I offered alternatives. I said we’d go this weekend, do it right. He said, Ok i’ll just not get one love you.
And the room is just a room. The TV is on. The dog is breathing on the couch. Nothing changes. The world does not register that anything has happened. I’m sitting there staring at my phone wanting to cry over a suit I couldn’t buy in time, and the house is so quiet it feels like it’s mocking me. Like the indifference of the room is the correct response and the explosion in my chest is the error.
The child forgets. The parent keeps the receipt.
I think about my mother. She was a city councilwoman and an alcoholic, and I was a kid who asked for things that were well outside of her means. I imagine she sat with the same feeling. The specific gravity of not being able to give your child something they asked for. But she had a bottle, and the bottle was a shortcut to the same place I’ve spent years building by hand: a quieter interior. She drowned hers with a substance. I starved mine with discipline. I became the anti-alcoholic. The guy who manages fifty sites and coaches flag football and drives to six stores and files the complaint and makes the call and never stops moving. And arrived at the exact same emotional grave. My success is just the socially acceptable version of her bottle. The chart just spells it differently.
There are three versions of the same thing on the table. Her bottle. My weed, which I quit after years of being high around the clock. My Adderall, which mutes the signal and carries the endorsement of a medical professional. Three delivery mechanisms, one destination. Only one gets written in a chart as treatment.
I look forward to not feeling. That’s not addiction language. That’s survival language. I learned to put away emotions long before any substance entered the picture. The drugs are aftermarket parts. The original engineering is mine.
Feeling is dangerous. Not because it’s painful, though it is. Because it’s justification. In both directions. If I let the dark in, it doesn’t sit quietly. I know what I’m capable of. I know that when I am hurt, my deepest instinct is to make others feel the same way. Not loud. Not a fist through drywall. Quiet. Surgical. I know exactly where to apply force, and that knowledge scares me more than the pain that started it.
And if I let the good in, I have to leave the door open for the rest of it. You can’t selectively numb. You can’t install a filter that catches the dark and lets the light through. The deal is all or nothing, and I chose nothing, because the dark is harder to keep at bay, and what lives on the other side of my composure would be devastating to everything I’ve built.
The mask is load-bearing. It’s not protecting me. It’s protecting the structure. The kids, the job, the custody, the career, the version of me that people trust with seven hundred users and two children and a dog named Melon. If the real thing gets out, the whole architecture collapses.
That’s not emotional regulation. That’s containment. And I’m the only engineer on site.
My therapist would call this progress. My chart says euthymic and the system moves on. But here’s what the chart doesn’t capture: a guy who’s thriving, a guy who’s surviving, and a guy who’s drowning all look the same on paper. All stable. All showing up. All maintaining the engine. The system has no mechanism to tell the difference, because it only measures the outside.
And no one knows. I very rarely let the mask slip, and when I do, it’s tactical. A last resort, a deployment, not a confession. Even the reveal is a tool. The only time anyone catches a glimpse of what’s underneath, it’s because I chose to show it, and I chose to show it because I needed it to hit.
Nobody ever sees the superposition. They see the collapse.
I exist in both states simultaneously. The guy who coaches flag football and drives to six stores for a Pokémon card and files ethics complaints at midnight and builds systems and fights wars on behalf of people who will never know his name. And the guy sitting in the dark telling a screen that everything hurts. Both are real. Both are present. Both are running at all times. But the moment someone observes me, I collapse into whichever state the situation demands. Dad. Employee. Fighter. Stable.
Euthymic.
So here’s what I want you to know, if you’re reading this and you recognize the idle. If your engine runs but doesn’t go anywhere. If the performance became the person and you can’t find the seam between the mask and the face. Then you know the cost.
Euthymia is not the absence of mood disturbance. It’s the presence of all of it with the volume turned to zero. You feel everything and choose to honor none of it.
That’s not a diagnosis. That’s a discipline. And the cost is that a nine-year-old says love you over text and you feel it hit a wall instead of land.
Halfway to the end. The engine is running. The dashboard light is green. The chart says I’m fine.
I know that place, and the question about joy. Euthymia. That's the term for it? That I didn't know. Thank you for being open about this.