“For disabled women, the road to discovering our sexuality is lonely,” says 24-year-old Nu Misra from Delhi.

Describing themself as an activist, Nu, who has an acquired physical disability, says that they are simply trying to shatter the narrative built around disabled people — one of pity and praise.

“We’ve all been gaslighted time and again by a society that refuses to acknowledge and truly listen to disabled voices,” they say in conversation with The Better India.

Instances through their teen years made them privy to the “otherness” that people assigned to them.

“I’d notice people’s gaze change when they laid their eyes on me at airports, grocery stores, malls…So I learned a trick to deal with it. I would take off my spectacles whenever I was in a public place so that I wouldn’t notice them staring at me.”

Nu adds that while the trick worked perfectly well around strangers, their brain began looking for this “gaze” as they turned 18 and started going on dates.

“I was fixated on the idea of my date accepting me for who I was,” they say. Only when this realisation hit did Nu realise that society had crafted insensitive stereotypes that revolve around disabled people and their sexuality.

© The Better India