Throughout my childhood and into high school, I thought of myself as a quitter, thanks mainly to migraine attacks that gave me no other option.

It all started around age 9, when I began frequenting the school nurse's office because of pounding behind my eyes. While my classmates attended music lessons, I lay down on the vinyl bed, closed my eyes, and counted the tears as they fell to the rhythm of my thrumming temples.

The pain would disappear a few hours later, only to return within a few days. Preventive medications helped, but the strongest defense was sleep. Only after resting could I reemerge from my isolation tank (also known as my bedroom), drained but free of pain.

But sleeping away the pain also meant sleeping away my life. On my first day of high school, I came home and discovered that—"Surprise!"—my mom had organized a party to celebrate. I had a migraine, so instead of joining in the fun, I passed the platters, thanked my extended family for coming, and crashed on the recliner while they chewed and chatted around me. I also slept through most of my quinceanera and an orchestra concert I was supposed to perform in.

I decided to stop "quitting" after I calculated that I'd lost about 1,000 hours to fitful sleep over the years. That's like being in a coma for a month and a half, if the hours were compressed. Fearing I was missing out on life, I decided to optimize my conscious hours—in short, to stop saying no.

I found a quote about quitting from the 1993 movie Rudy and taped it above my desk in college: "Oh, well, since when are you the quitting kind?" It motivated me in tough times—when I didn't feel like writing my senior thesis, when I had to study for a Chinese exam, when I was preparing for a conference.

By the end of my junior year, I had worked three part-time jobs, collaborated with two of my role models on a podcast about human trafficking, participated in a forum with a Nobel Peace Prize recipient, and secured an internship at an organization fighting sex trafficking in Asia. But on the flight over, I had a migraine. My seat was in front of the roaring engine, so I sought shelter in the bathroom, where I gripped the sink, leaned against the mirror, and cried. I cried partly from the physical pain, but mostly from mental exhaustion. When another passenger jiggled the latch, I wiped my tears and vowed to stop saying yes to everything.

Ten months later, I was fighting another migraine as I prepared for a writing and well-being symposium in Ireland. One week before the conference, where I was going to present research, I spent the night vomiting into a trash can. I finally crawled back into bed, and with one hand pressed against my pulsing temples and the other holding my hollowing rib cage—losing 15 pounds in three weeks was a side effect of my new medication—I considered skipping the conference.

The next morning, feeling no better, I drafted an email to the symposium organizers about withdrawing. As I reread the email, I glanced at the quote above my desk and asked myself, "Since when did I start quitting again?"

"Right now," I thought as I clicked "send" with renewed determination. Sure, I was disappointed I wouldn't present my research, but I also recognized that given my medication's side effects and the migraines themselves, I wouldn't fully appreciate the experience.

In pressing "send," I recognized that saying yes or no all the time wasn't the answer. Addressing each situation independently and making decisions based on my health at the time is more realistic. And "no"—or what I thought of as quitting—isn't a sign of failure. It's a sign of knowing and accepting my limits. I can live with that.