The pain was shocking, rippling up my hand and into the neighboring fingers. I could see the lance of bruise-colored material through my nail, but it went deep enough that none of it was exposed; I couldn’t even attempt to pull it out.

The other day, not long after flying into Seattle to house- and pet-sit while my family took a much needed vacation, I felt a sensation in the back of my throat that I’ve come to associate with post-nasal drip.

Almost every time I’ve flown out to visit that wing of my family in recent years, I’ve come down with a four-day upper-respiratory something-or-other that’s not-fun for two of those days, and miserable for the others. I had work to do (my own, plus the tasks and chores associated with keeping a cat, dog, and two houses alive and thriving) but at that moment, all my attention swung inward. While I assiduously performed my various duties, I knew what I was in for, and all the stresses associated with every other aspect of my life and my Seattle commitments made way for this new, more immediate and pressing concern.

After visiting urgent care and getting that bit of wooden shrapnel removed (while numbed up, thankfully), I tottered home. All those responsibilities were still there, waiting for me. When that fresh bout of Seattle-itis cleared up, I still had all the same tasks to handle, work to do, concerned thoughts to think.

It’s remarkable, though, how those sorts of worries all but disappear when something more salient (or painful, or uncomfortable, or worrying) crashes into our lives, consuming our previously spoken-for concern capacity. And it’s notable that my not fixating on those things for a few days didn’t leave me any worse off: if anything, they seemed like smaller issues, barely worth a thought, when I spent some time worrying about something else, for a while.

I don’t think I’ll be shoving shivs under my fingernails to ease my unsettled mind any time soon, but I may try to remind myself of just how purposeless all that worrying is the next time I find myself jittery about something less intense than painful sickness or even more painful tissue damage.

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We contain multitudes, in other words, but many of our social norms and internal pressures hobble or compress our multifarious natures, flattening our full complexity into something easier to label and organize.

We thus end up narrowly self-defining for public consumption. We’re not not omnicapable: we’re an accountant. We’re a mother. We’re Disc Golf Guy.

In reality even the most focused among us are far more than the labels we wear. Few mothers are just mothers, few disc golf enthusiasts never leave the course. These labels sprawl like over-stretched beach umbrellas, struggling to cover the full complexity of rich, varied lives.

But our societies are set up in such a way that there’s little benefit to (or sometimes limited opportunity in) being all the things we are.

An accountant might find their career capped if they load their resume with information about their (by any metric) impressive LEGO sculptures. Parents who gush about their enthusiasm for microbiology may, in the course of conversation, be pressured to speak only about their children (despite having the time, attention, and enthusiasm for both their offspring and Archaea).

If we’re in a context in which the goal is simply to keep the lights on, or to be socially palatable (in a vanilla sort of way), this is fair enough. That potential employer is looking for evidence of your accounting chops, not your scuba diving certification. That fellow parent at the party is looking for shared experiences to concisely bond over, not chasing your life story.

But many of us allow these siloed versions of ourselves to become the only version we present to the world, and that tendency can echo through our social and professional spaces until we eventually think of ourselves—our shimmering, crystalline selves—as the mono-dimensional, made-for-consumption paper dolls we play-act out of prudence or politeness.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with this, as the incentives that pervade many such spaces nudge us into whittling ourselves into the proper situational shape. There are benefits to doing so, in other words, and so it makes sense that we might try to reap those benefits by adhering to those norms.

I suspect, though, that these are the forces (or some of the forces) behind the malaise and identity issues many adults face when they wake up one day and realize they’re not living the lives they want, or the lives they feel they were meant to live.

Folks who remain flexible, who have a malleable sense of self, will generally just roll with the punches; they have a fond familiarity with rethinking, reshaping, and pivoting.

People whose identities are more fixed and rigid, however, are more likely to suffer cracks and straining when the need for change arises.

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Any kind of bad habit or unaddressed issue can lead to the accumulation of similar debts. Unhealthy eating, not exercising or stretching, not developing and maintaining relationships of various sorts, not learning and trying new things: they can all result in negative consequences that, in addition to being not great unto themselves, also accrue interest. So after the initial negative whammy, they can also lead to dissipating friend groups, deteriorating health, an ever-shrinking range of movement, and an increasingly myopic sense of what’s happening and possible in an ever-changing world.

We all have different capacities and limitations, and our ambitions will tend to be capped by our baselines and circumstances. It’s not possible to get a perfect night’s sleep (whatever that means for our unique biologies) every night, and it’s not possible to always be upbeat and friendly, to eat nothing but perfectly healthy foods, and to always be pushing ourselves beyond our current kens and comfort levels.

Investing in ourselves and our lives usually results in positive interest accrual, thankfully, netting us all sorts of benefits in addition to staving off (or tempering the impact of) debt. And that’s important since, again, the accumulation of some debts is unavoidable, and the consequences for not confronting those debts can be significant and life-shaping.

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