I am NOT A BURDEN.

I am NOT A BURDEN.

I am NOT A BURDEN.

Disabled people are

NOT A BURDEN.

I can’t tell you how soul crushing it is to feel like a burden. This can create everlasting dripping shadows of worthlessness and shame. As an adoptee, I’ve felt the relics of being a burden since I was abandoned. I was reminded I was unwanted and bought and paid for which required sacrifices I should only feel lucky for. This is where adoptee stories typically end. Our lives and stories are reduced to an unwanted child and our story finishes with how amazing the adopters must be. It’s rarely about the system orphans have had to endure, the trauma and the many kinds of abuses potentially inflicted upon us. We are looked upon as the unwanted and a burden.

And as a disabled person, I’ve felt the pressure of being a burden through the consistent responses to my disability (that I’ve had for over half my life). I’m considered useless, incapable with sadness forever fixated upon my forehead, accompanied by the amazement of what a saint my partner must be for “sacrificing his life”. For some reason society feels the need to remind me of how inferior and undesirable I am, so it’s exceptional that someone took on such a broken person. “You’re lucky!” is the glint in people’s eyes when they see us, not, “You’re looked upon inhumanly and limited access by society. I’m sorry.”

These labels have unjustly deemed me as the paltry one; as if this is the only redeeming thing about me after 43 years of life—the unwanted one with “too many problems” (like society portrays onto disabled and orphans and foster children as the excuse to overlook us) to want. Meanwhile, much of who I am and what I’ve become is sidelined without a blip of curiosity beyond these identities I never asked for.

As an orphan and a disabled person, I’ve felt I’ve had to constantly prove my worthiness in order to be (and continue to be) loved and deflect the burden I am. These feelings infiltrated me since the beginning, creating a ruthlessly self-critical person. But after 43 years of this, it’s become tiring. I am not a burden. You are not a burden.

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