This is a first-person account, narrated to The Better India by Himanshika Sharma, who is living with Juvenile Rheumatoid Arthritis and building an independent life and career despite it.

My father once carried me down a staircase because I couldn't get down on my own.

Years later, he stood beside a car I had bought with my own earnings, running his hand across the bonnet in quiet disbelief.

Between those two moments lies the story of a disease that took away many things I thought I would have, but never managed to take away the one thing that mattered most: my ability to build a meaningful life.

Growing up with a future no one could predict

My first symptom appeared when I was three years old. Five years later, I was diagnosed with Juvenile Rheumatoid Arthritis (JRA), an autoimmune condition that attacks the joints.

I don't remember much about those early years. I don't remember the hospital visits, the injections, or the treatments my parents tried in the hope that I would recover. I've only heard those stories from my mother, who still struggles to tell them without becoming emotional.

In some ways, I think not remembering was a blessing.

I've never known a version of myself without this disease. It didn't interrupt my life — it became the reality around which my life was built.

As I grew older, JRA gradually damaged my knees, wrists, fingers, hips and neck. While other children looked forward to sports days and school trips without a second thought, I learned early what it meant to live with pain, fatigue and physical limitations.

But childhood has a way of making even difficult realities feel normal.

Until one day, it doesn't.

The staircase that changed everything

In 2010, I was in Class 10.

One morning, dressed for school, I stood at the top of the staircase in our ancestral home in Ambala. I looked down at the steps — and I couldn't move. My legs simply refused to cooperate.

I stood there crying until my father heard me. He rushed upstairs, picked me up, and carried me down.

At the time, it felt like just another difficult morning.

Looking back, I realise it was one of the first moments that forced me to confront a reality I had been trying to ignore. My body was changing, and so was my future.

Over the next few years, walking became increasingly difficult. By 2014, I began using a wheelchair.

What changed wasn't just the way I moved. It was the way the world responded to me.

I realised how many buildings, offices, public spaces and everyday experiences were designed with the assumption that everyone could walk.

When you can't, even the simplest tasks become complicated.

The invisible work of living with a chronic illness

People often imagine chronic illness as a........

© The Better India