I am ashamed of how little joy I can access on some days

Dear Delyara, My children can be laughing. The weather can be fine. Nothing terrible can be happening. And still, on some days, I feel so emotionally distant from joy that I start feeling ashamed of the distance itself. That shame is heavy. It tells me I should be more grateful, more emotionally available, more present in my own life. It turns numbness into a moral problem. It makes me watch myself from the outside and judge the exact places where I cannot quite reach delight, even when delight is standing right in front of me. I don’t know how to explain the sadness of seeing good things and still being too tired, too low, or too inwardly crowded to fully receive them. But I live there more often than I want to admit.