There are a lot of reasons not to vote for Donald Trump, including all the racist, sexist and otherwise-horrific insults he has thrown at millions of Americans.

While watching him mock Serge Kovaleski, a Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times investigative reporter with arthrogryposis, a congenital, joint-related condition, I felt Trump was mocking me. I have two disabilities, both of them life-altering and serious.

According to the 2012 U.S. Census, about 38.3 million people have a severe disability. I’ve heard figures as high as 45 million.

Some of us are born with our disabilities, like I was with my mental illness. I have written a lot about how I live my life with bipolar disorder. There’s a common thread: It’s extremely difficult at times. But accidents and diseases can come out of nowhere, as well, to no fault of anyone. People get hit by distracted drivers texting on the road. They become paralyzed or even die. Now mosquitoes carrying the Zika virus are the enemy.

More than a year ago something else happened to my body unexpectedly. One day I got an excruciating pain in my lower right leg. I checked in at an emergency room, where a team of trauma surgeons immediately battled to save my leg from amputation. It turns out I contracted something called compartmental syndrome. It’s an extremely rare medical condition that often requires cutting off limbs. I was incredibly lucky. The surgeons were able to keep my leg attached to my knee.

I can stand up and put weight on both my legs and walk, though often I’m unsteady on my feet — but now my foot and toes just dangle like a hanging earring because almost all my muscles were removed. The nerves in my lower right leg are all dead, so I can’t feel anything from the knee down. I can’t wiggle my toes. I can’t move my foot up and down, and surgery can’t repair it. For a year I wore a brace.

Every morning after I wake up, I sit on my bed and bend over to begin the tedious process of putting on my orthopedic shoes. The left one goes on fine. Sometimes it takes me more than 10 minutes to put on my right shoe, and sometimes I need help from someone else. I have to wear stiff shoes that keep my right foot stable. Otherwise I face tripping on my own dangling foot and falling down, face forward.

I wear the same shoe every day. It’s just part of my life, like a uniform. Goodbye high heels, girlie open-toed sandals and anything pretty and feminine.

Most days I take a paratransit shuttle for the disabled, elderly and others who can’t drive. Getting picked up at my house and dropped off at a destination might look good on paper, but the shuttle is a shared-ride service that makes many stops to pick up and drop off passengers. Usually I am picked up more than an hour before I need to be somewhere, and I often spend an hour on the shuttle as others get dropped off. I’ve seen wheelchair passengers dropped off outside a closed office door in the rain at 7 a.m. for an 8 a.m. doctor’s appointment. But it’s only thanks to federal laws that we even have a paratransit service at all for those who can’t drive, no matter how problematic it is. I doubt Trump even knows what a paratransit service is.

We disabled people all have our stories to share. We may be blind, deaf, wheelchair-bound, veterans with missing limbs or post-traumatic stress disorder, unable to speak or a grandparent with Alzheimer’s disease, but we clearly can understand who makes fun of us, who laughs at us and who just doesn’t like us. We’ve spent lifetimes experiencing discrimination, funny looks, rude comments. I just never expected it from a presidential candidate.

I am going back to college now to become a social worker and help others with disabilities. My tuition is paid for by vocational rehabilitation, a federal program that pays for the training of disabled people so we can learn new skills and go back to work. I am afraid that under a Trump presidency, programs like these would be cut.

Like many, I was severely discriminated against by the health insurance industry before Obamacare became law in 2012. I was willing to pay any price for insurance but was always denied. Under the Affordable Care Act, companies were forced to cover people with long-term disabilities, something they hate doing. They don’t make any money off of us. Trump and many Republican politicians want to repeal this law. It would turn our country backward.

My story about my disabilities is only one of dozens of millions in this country and the reason millions of disabled Americans will be voting for Hillary Clinton, as I am. Disability laws can take years to pass, and we’re not interested in turning back the clock. With Clinton there’s hope that Congress will pass comprehensive mental health reform that has been decades in the making.

I watched the Democratic National Convention and was inspired to see Anastasia Somoza — an advocate for those with disabilities who’s in a wheelchair — speak to the thousands of delegates. People like her and Kovaleski are the real heroes in this election season.