this is reality

This is not at all what I feel like today, all that cheery sunshine, that happily gurgling water, that warm light of the end of a wintry afternoon.....

Oh-ho-ho no! What I feel like is a black, barbed-wire fence, kind of ball of dirty despair. I hate that feeling. Nothing, nothing I have done today has lifted it, not even the tiniest bit. All the usual things, the things I turn to when I need a bit of joy, they are blah empty dusty useless futile exercises in futility! Oh I hate it when I feel like this.

Why? I ask myself. The problems that have me in knots now were also there when I felt light and free and happy. That just goes to show you that problems are the real things. This cynical angry frustrated being just realized that minimizing problems when you are feeling "light and free and happy" is a gross error in judgment, perhaps fatal, brought on by too much happiness.
This miserable jail of problems on every side, monsters that dissolve out of the hard stone walls to terrify my imagination, horrors that well up under my feet, pain and shame and fear that has my body on the rack -- that's reality. I just didn't see it with my "light and free and happy" rose-coloured glasses, that's all. Now, this is more like it:

.