Strange word, in many ways: simple, ya know, but not, if you dig down--or stop to think. It quickly becomes complicated once you start to feel it.
It's a keyword in popular music, and big on the talk show circuit, too. I'm not sure that the self-help publishing industry could survive without it. Many people have a lot invested in it, for varying reasons.
Depression can distort it, take it out of context, make you feel it in a way you know isn't true. Except for how it feels.
Especially that part when you can't quite seem to explain yourself, can't get others to hear and grasp what you mean, no matter how hard you try. When you hear yourself explained back to you, or described or just joked about in the normal way that people joke about each other. The ways you joke about yourself and others all the time. Only this time, the person they are describing has only the vaguest resemblance to you. It's the self that strangers would readily see, but they all seem to be accepting it as the true you.
And there isn't anybody around to say, "no, that's not right, that's not the girl I know," because somehow all those people are gone. They've left the planet, or your life, or maybe just the bus stop because it's time to go home.
And your depressed brain is making that seem endless and eternal rather than just a passing moment, because well, that's what depressed brains do: distort.
It makes simple words into phases, gives them dimension they don't deserve.
Alone.
It's not true.
Even when it feels like it is.