I'm not a happy person.

I feel guilty saying it, guilty typing those words out into a document. It reads like an entry from a private journal, a secret that people should never have to see. Why do I feel so ashamed of an intrinsic part of my personality?

My default mood, the factory setting that I was born with, is somewhere between the acerbic Bones from Star Trek and Aubrey Plaza's perpetually sour Parks and Recreation character April Ludgate. I'm introspective and an introvert and I'm blessed (or perhaps cursed) with a resting bitch face that is rivaled only by that of the infamously grumpy Kanye West. In short, I both look and act like a portrait of misery.

But I am not miserable, or if I am, it is my own simple brand of misery that I am content with being. Happiness is, like all other emotions, a spectrum. There are not merely two states of being: those of happiness and unhappiness; there is a plethora of shades in between. My not being happy is less of a failure on my part and more a failure on the everyday vernacular's penchant for having a strict dichotomy of emotion. If anything, I feel as though I would be incapable of experiencing true happiness if I was "happy" all of the time.

So I am ready to confess: I am not a happy person. And I'm okay with that.