Schopenhauer, 1823:

If at times I have felt unhappy, then this has been largely due to a mistaken identity: on those occasions I regarded myself as someone other than who I am, and lamented that person's misfortune: e.g. a Privatdozent who is not made a professor and has no audience, or one of whom a philistine here speaks ill or a gossip there talks scandal, or the defendent in that bodily injury suit, or the lover whom the girl he particularly wants rejects, or the patient housebound by his illness...I was not any of these, all this is alien material from which, at best, the coat was made which I wore for a while and then took off in favour of another. But who am I really? He who wrote the World as Will and Representation...That is who I am, and what could challenge that man in the years he still draws breath?

Try to look past, if you can, the burst of ego at the end of this quote, and see through to the necessity of it represented in the catalog of misfortunes that he recalls so easily and declares to be so illusory. This is not me, this isn't happening. This suffering, this illness, this need to be recognized is not me, for I am something else, something I can be proud of.