I have never really thought about my body before the teenage years. I was diagnosed by Cerebral Palsy in the early years of my life. I have always thought about my body as something which needed repair or which doesn’t really work properly. While I was conscious that I had an intelligent mind but I always seemed to kinda hate my body.
I often heard people say, “Oh my god, she is so beautiful, but she’s disabled” or something like “Such a beautiful face, but see how God has made her disabled.”
From my childhood, I used to think that disability and beauty don’t really go hand in hand. I could only be either one of them, either disabled or beautiful. I had always thought that my sisters and girl-friends are much more beautiful than me because they were able-bodied.
It’s not that nobody has ever called me pretty or beautiful, on the contrary, I was called beautiful every other day, from friends, family and teachers. I always thought that they were calling me beautiful just because of sympathy. I was never thought of being beautiful, or showing off my beauty because I always thought that I was more intelligent than beautiful.
In our society, we have a very rigid beauty standard. A person needs to be tall, fair and slim to be called beautiful. If a person deviates a little from this beauty standard then the person is ugly according to society. In this standard of beauty, disability never comes into play.
When you are born with a disability, society never looks at you as a human. As a person with a disability, if you want to get educated, you would have to cross a huge number of stereotypes while getting there.
If you want to go on a date with your boyfriend, it is then also that you are looked from a critical lens. I am not saying that you are beautiful only if you have a boyfriend but I am saying that the critical lens on you will be always there.
Over a few years time, I have started falling in love with my own body, just the way it is.
I was never really comfortable in looking at my own body without clothes. I always used to find my body undesirable and not really worth seeing in the mirror, maybe because of my disability.
I think that it was always in my own head that my body was not beautiful, because of my disability.
As I grew up, I began to realize that it is my own body and I would have to love it the way it is.
That is when I started clicking beautiful pictures of myself and post it on social media without any fear. The kind of love, I have received on those pictures was unmeasurable. It has helped me to accept myself the way I am. A beautiful, sexy, and confident woman.