I am two people. I am unapologeticaly, achingly confident. It was the number one word used to describe me by my coworkers during some long-forgotten ice breaker exercise. It might be code for being kind of a dick. But it takes confidence to be kind of a dick, because you have to believe you are worth enough that people will still want you around their friend group and workplace even if your personality quirk is mild assholishness.

The other person is worthless. I know my worthlessness more intimately than I know the rest of me. It brushes gently against the back of my mind on the happiest of days. I can't describe it as heavy or hard on the bad days, because at most it feels like emptiness. Like I've been deserted by the person I am and was. All that's left then is the worthlessness, my own bullshit existence in an ugly, hopeless void. It's almost separate from the depression, because it can't choke me. It can't sit on my chest with its heavy feet and stop me from getting up. It's light as air, immaterial as moonlight, floating in my veins like a vitamin. An innoculation against caring what happens to me. It's the freedom depression gives you, not caring about yourself. The only relief becomes my conviction that I am nothing, will always be nothing, and am thus absolved of all responsibility and care. Maybe it breeds something that reads as confidence, because if I don't care about me why would I care about you? We are all empty nothings.