When I was in elementary school, every year for Halloween the students would wear costumes to school. One year, a boy pulled his mask out of his backpack, looked at it briefly, and then stuffed it back inside. “I’m not going to wear that,” he muttered to no one in particular. “I just want to be more me today.”

Fast-forward to an afternoon many years later, when my bare foot smashed into the edge of an ottoman I was walking past. It was quite painful, and it also seemed clear that a toe was broken. Upset, I lamented, “I wish I could just go back to being the me I was thirty seconds ago!”

Suddenly the boy’s comment about being “more me” came to mind. It was so out of the blue that it derailed my aggravation-fueled train of thought, and I instead found myself considering, “What does it mean to be me?”