My name is Stanter Kandola and I'm forty. I live in Yorkshire, West Yorkshire.
When we first moved to Mirfield which is a very small town-cum-village in Yorkshire I was about ten.
We were the only Asian people within the village apart from my grandmother and grandfather who kind of were around as well. So growing up here I felt quite alienated from other people.
It was around about when I was fourteen that I really began to get a kind of sense of my own self, a sense of my own sexuality and what that meant.
Just feeling very excited about being alive and being myself then suddenly you know I wake up and I have this pain in my foot and the next day it's the other foot, it's kind of very strange, didn't think anything to it.
And then went to the doctors and consequently find out that I have rheumatoid arthritis.
Being fifteen and being told that my life was going to move towards a wheelchair and that's what really was the most destructive element of it because after that in a way I shut down.
As the signs of the rheumatoid arthritis began to show themselves I began to really lose sense of who I was as a human being, as a person, as a woman, as a girl and began to withdraw from everyone.
My fingers started closing in on themselves and I would have to kind of slowly coax them back open again.
And that began to get worse and worse to the point where my hands were actually just physically actually closing up.
And I had to go and have surgery where they opened up each knuckle and they scraped the tendons and cleaned them up and sewed them back up again.
Over the years I probably had round about ten surgeries or so and they, most of them have been very invasive.
Most of my joints are affected by having RA and now - where before it was all internal it was my choice to share with anybody whether I wanted to or not suddenly you know I have these scars and they're on parts of my body that are obvious and that everybody can see.
You know feeling, feeling unattractive and feeling like I wasn't sexy and feeling like nobody was interested in me or the reason people maybe were looking at me was because I was walking a little bit funny or because I might be carrying a cane.
To myself, inside myself I was dying inside myself I was breaking apart. I don't think I really slept since I was fifteen, sixteen years of age.
And, and all of this has taken me to my darkest places, you know, it's taken me to hell.
But at the same time it's taught me so much about who I am.
And this is my body and I love this body, it's taken me to some amazing places and it's taken me to some dark places.
But would I swap it for anybody else's? I don't think so.
View Stanter's video.