There is a particular brand of misery that doesn't announce itself dramatically. It doesn't arrive with a breakdown or a crisis or anything you could point to and say: there, that's the thing. It arrives, instead, as a kind of flattening. You are technically functioning. The emails get answered. The work gets done. You show up, you perform competence, you even occasionally produce something you don't entirely hate. And yet…something is missing, not from the work, but from you. Some quality of aliveness that used to be there has quietly packed its bags and left without notice.