Many rational people—even very dedicated ones—would have given up at this point. Michael’s reaction could not have been more different. “I wasn’t going to let these fuckers stop me,” he said.

He applied to thirty more schools. Only one accepted him, and only because the admissions officer loved baseball, the sport Michael played in college.

When Michael finished up med school, he decided to pursue a residency in neurosurgery. But when he sent out his residency applications, he once again faced a slew of rejections because of his height. He resigned to work in pediatrics for a year. “It was good, but I missed surgery really badly,” he told me.

He applied to dozens of orthopedic surgery programs, managing to land at Albany Medical College, where the head of the orthopedic surgery program didn’t care what anyone else thought. Michael assured his colleagues all he needed to do his job was a step stool. He excelled at the program and was even chosen to lead grand rounds in orthopedics.

Eventually, Michael became a professor of orthopedic surgery at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, one of the country’s top medical institutions. He specialized in children with dwarfism and developed new techniques to help people with spinal deformities.

When I reached this point in my conversation with Michael, I was as awed by his accomplishments as I was by his easy acceptance of his physical difference. I also felt that—there’s no other way to say this—by comparison, I sound really whiny.

Yes, I had a rough time in childhood and adolescence. But I’m virtually indistinguishable from all the other mid-career office drones in Washington, D.C., where I now live. Even if I weren’t, there are plenty of immigrants here, and it’s considered politically incorrect to probe too deeply into anyone’s ethnicity. In short, I can pretty much glide through life pretending that I’ve always been a middle-class, East Coast white girl. When people learn I’m from Texas, they’re often surprised.

So, I thought, why am I in therapy, but Michael Ain is at Johns Hopkins, saying “fuck you,” literally, to the naysayers? How do you write your sixtieth medical-school application when everyone is telling you that short people can’t be doctors?

Michael knew he was an outsider. Yet he seemed certain he belonged among the insiders. I was curious whether people could cultivate an attitude like his. How can people who are different embrace whatever it is that makes them unusual and, just like Michael did, use it to power them?