The lessons we take from obstacles we encounter can be fundamental to later success. Recount a time when you faced a challenge, setback, or failure. How did it affect you, and what did you learn from the experience?

The nurse taped a plastic bracelet around a wrist so thin the band had to be cinched twice, and I read my own name printed on it like it belonged to someone else. It was the fall I should have been starting freshman year. Instead I was in a hospital bed, and the doctors kept using careful words for a simple fact: I had lost about a third of my body weight, and there was a chance I would not wake up one morning.

Anorexia nervosa. I'd had it since the spring of eighth grade. My parents thought a change of scenery might loosen its grip, so my mom and I went to rural central Mexico for three months to teach English to kids who called me maestra and never once knew what I was doing to myself at night. The mountains were beautiful. The classroom smelled like chalk and dust. I came home lighter than when I left, because the thing eating me had crossed the border in my own head, and no landscape, however far away, could reach it.

The hospital was where the actual fight started. And it was so boring it embarrassed me. Every meal came on a beige tray with a slip of paper listing what I had to finish. I would push the fork away. Then I would pick it up. Refusing was the easiest thing in the world, familiar as breathing, and eating meant sitting with a fear that had a taste, thick, specific, right at the back of my throat. It took more will to lift that fork than it ever took to skip a hundred meals before. I had never worked that hard at anything. And the work was just chewing.

Some days I lost. I'd leave half a tray and the number on the scale would sit there the next morning like a verdict.

There was one morning after a day like that. I woke up in room 204 with the same fear waiting exactly where I'd left it, and the breakfast tray came, and I ate it. That was all. No music swelled. Nobody clapped. I just finished the eggs and set the fork down and looked out the window, and it felt like the smallest possible thing a person could do, so small it was almost nothing, and I had done it anyway.

It was around then that I started noticing things I had walked past my whole life. A nurse named Imani had a way of catching light in her eyes when she laughed at the nurses' station. The sunset came through the ward window in a color I did not have a word for and stained the linoleum orange. I found out that the hardest person to fight is the one wearing your own face, and I found out something else at the same time: that a sunset is enough of a reason to keep going, if you let it be. Beauty in tiny things became the closest thing I have to a religion.

I went back to freshman year over four months late, walking into classrooms where everyone else already knew where the bathrooms were. I had missed a third of the year. I did not feel fixed. I felt like someone who had been to the bottom of something and understood that the dark was not the end of the story but a step you had to take before anything real could grow, which sounds like something you'd read on a poster, I know, except I had actually been there and it was actually true. I decided I would spend my life looking for beauty and making more of it, and I know I will get knocked flat again, and I know the fork will feel heavy again too.

Now a photo of a stray kitten I found that spring sits on my desk, one I fed scraps to outside the hospital courtyard. Every time I pass it I stop for a second, because a face that small once taught me why to keep waking up.