Being a Burden

The Fear of Being a Burden

I ran into two people on a sidewalk last week. Then I blocked two more on a stairwell — all in the same day. They looked at me the way you look at someone who takes up more space than they should. Rude. Entitled. On purpose. Here’s a quick look at what that actually looked like: watch the short.

None of it was on purpose. I didn’t see them coming.

I’ve spent the last 25 years slowly losing my sight, and the sight loss itself isn’t what wears on me most. It’s the pride underneath it, the reflex to say I can do it even on the days it isn’t true anymore. That pride kept covering for something I only recently understood: fear of being a burden.

Like me walking, that fear doesn’t always stay on the right path. It shows up in not wanting to ask a friend for a ride. In pretending to navigate a dim restaurant alone rather than admit I can’t find my chair. In going years without a cane because using one means explaining myself, over and over, to people who used to know a different version of me, or worse, explaining it at the grocery to the person who sees me using it yet still able to read the label on a jar.

The Cost of Never Being a Burden

A relative of mine has built an entire approach to life around never being a burden. They won’t ask for help if there’s any other option. They’ll pay a stranger before they’ll ask a sibling. They’ve already planned every detail of a funeral that hasn’t happened yet, so no one else has to carry that weight later. Not morbid, just consistent. One goal runs underneath everything. Don’t leave a burden behind, not even in death.

That instinct is one I recognize.

A friend of mine, in the middle of a serious medical fight, taught me the other side of it. Everyone around her had started treating her like glass, careful and overly gentle, and she hated every bit of it. When I needed a ride one day, I asked her, knowing exactly what she was in the middle of. She said yes without a second thought. On the way home she told me she was glad to have been asked. Left alone that day, she wouldn’t have gotten out of her PJs. Being needed gave her a reason to.

Letting someone help isn’t only a need getting met. Sometimes it’s the gift the other person needed to give.

Letting someone help isn’t only a need getting met. Sometimes it’s the gift the other person needed to give.

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Fiction Got Here First

When I can’t work through something myself, I write it into a character and let her wrestle with it instead. It’s often the only way I catch where God is already at work, before I’m able to see it on my own. In Vision of My Heart, Serafina lost her sight suddenly, nothing like the slow fade mine has been. In one scene she tells her father:

“I want to be useful. I want . . . I do not want to be a burden.”

Later, convinced the man she loves deserves someone who doesn’t need managing, she calls herself a weight he’d have to carry.

“He does not need a burden laid on top of that,” she says, “someone who cannot see to the end of her own arm.”

Her father won’t let it stand.

“You are not a burden,” he tells her. “You are my daughter, and any man who cannot see your value is not worth your tears.”

That scene was fiction long before it was confession.

Naming What I Need

Here’s where this lands, at least for now: the people around me have no way to know what I’m carrying unless I say it out loud — and that’s not their failure, it’s mine, if the silence continues. A lanyard that clearly states my impairment, a cane I’m still getting used to, a simple request instead of a brave face — each one tells the truth instead of making someone else guess it. Signaling what I need is my responsibility, not something I should expect the people around me to figure out on their own.

Psalm 55:22 says to cast your burden on the Lord and He will sustain you. That’s the promise underneath all of this, out of fear of being a burden or not.

If you’re carrying something you’ve hidden out of fear of being a burden, here’s the first thing I want you to hear.

You are not alone.

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If you read the piece I wrote about getting ready for this season, you already know a little of what led here: What a Red Leaf Taught Me About Seasons

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