As a person with a disability, what is the biggest challenge you face every day? originally appeared on Quora, the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world. You can follow Quora on Twitter, Facebook, and Google Plus.

At certain points over the last 12 years, I would’ve told you it’s the pain that’s the biggest challenge. It barges into thoughts and plans and body positions, rendering me instantly powerless. Sometimes I recall that I’ve forgotten what it feels like to be comfortable, which is sad. Sometimes when I watch healthy people walk all unburdened and fluid it’s like watching hummingbirds flit by on eye-blink wings. How do they *do* that? How do they even exist?

At other points I would’ve insisted it’s the fatigue, trying to live a life wading through concrete. It’s having to ration my active, out-of-bed hours like butter during a grim 19th Century War. This energy is for holidays. We’re saving it.

These things may be my biggest physical obstacles. They’re probably the fiercest dragons to slay. They’re certainly the problems my doctors and I are trying our hardest to solve.

But I’ve never had a sparring partner like my post-disability mental state.

The ongoing dialogue I have with my own perspective and emotions is the biggest job I’ve ever undertaken. Exploring this internal give-and-take forces me to grow in surprising ways. It’s the richest, deepest, most gruelling, most personal job I can think of that doesn’t absolutely require me to leave my bed.

Being sick and disabled stripped away every mythology I ever had about my ability to control things. Daily, violently, it grinds my face against one inescapable truth of human life: I control nearly nothing. The only thing I can control is my reaction to all the things I cannot control.

I will never be perfect at that. I’m always training and trying to do it better, and I fail often. But it’s honest work.

Anyone can decide to accept this kind of challenge in life, of course. Anyone can dedicate themselves to turning their mental state into a topiary project: pruning it, coaxing it over time into something that’ll hopefully turn out beautiful. But by snatching away every other alternative in life, my illness has plopped this odd vocation in my lap. It was do this or turn into some angry, broken, contracted version of myself.

So I’m doing this, and it’s a constant challenge.

Round One

Severe, chronic pain and fatigue disrupt your life, starting in your early twenties. All your personal and career plans are sidelined indefinitely. Your days are now spent coping with symptoms. Your income is dramatically limited. You will live with family, partners, or in poverty— probably for the rest of your life.

Your Mission: Quick, find a way to be grateful to be alive! Do it now!

Round Two

Watch everyone you know lap you, their lives unfolding and progressing in ways that aren’t available to you. Meanwhile, your life looks like a stunted fraction of what you always expected. Sometimes you can almost hear the person you wanted to be by now—could have been without the illness. They’re screaming and howling and foaming beside you as you lay in bed, willing you to be well and catch up. Until you can, you’re both frustrated, helpless. Trapped.

Your Mission: Participate in the world. Extend kindness to the people around you, and learn to celebrate their bountiful lives, their glittering successes. Figure out your niche in your community and the workings of this planet—despite your limitations— without letting envy, bitterness, or futility eat you alive.

Round Three

You don’t get to have a job. You don’t get to exercise regularly, or for very many minutes at a time. Your social time is taken in short gasps. You cannot shower every day. Your time is dominated by pain and exhaustion and just plain coping. Barely anyone you know can relate to this.

Your Mission: Love yourself. Look in the mirror and believe you are enough.

There are about a billion and sixteen rounds total.

This question originally appeared on Quora. More questions on Quora:

* Related Topic: What is the best way to explain a disability to a 3-year-old?

* Healthy Living: How do you prevent a chronic sports injury?

* Pain: Why does cancer cause pain?

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