The Blame I Refuse to Carry:

A Survivor’s Reclamation

They said it was my fault.

Not just the trauma.
Not just the failed marriage.
Not just the disconnection.
But my son’s illness.

The brain tumour that changed everything. The child I stayed up nights for, fought doctors for, lost jobs and sleep and sanity over — they blamed me.

My adoptive family — the people who took me in, renamed me, erased the person I was born as — found a way to weaponise even their suffering. “If you’d done something differently,” they whispered, or said outright. “If you hadn’t broken away…”

This was the final echo of a narrative I’d spent my life drowning in:
“You are defective. You are the root.”

But I see the pattern now.

Adoption erased my origin story and then punished me for not being someone else.

I was the placeholder. The compliance project. The curated success story. And when I didn’t perform — when my life cracked, when I cried, when I dared to speak — I became the scapegoat. The reason why things went wrong. Even for my child.

They didn’t want to see his pain.
Because his pain mirrored mine.
And my pain was the truth they couldn’t face.

His tumour wasn’t inherited. But the blame was.

His body carried a rare condition — germinomas that lay dormant until puberty. Cells meant to become something else. Misplaced. Unresolved. Unseen. Sound familiar?

I, too, was displaced.
I, too, was renamed.
I, too, was misunderstood at a cellular level.

And while his condition was medical, my condition was existential.
And they punished both of us for refusing to be quiet about it.

The projection was surgical.

“You did this.”
“You’re the problem.”
“You broke the family.”

But I didn’t. I just finally told the truth.
I broke the silence, not the family.

They broke it the day they refused to let me have my own name.
The day they made love conditional.
The day they told me to be grateful for exile.

Here’s what I know now:

My son’s illness was not karmic punishment.
It was not cosmic blame.
It was a tragedy — but it was also a mirror.

It showed me what happens when cells go unheard. When potential is misplaced. When systems ignore warning signs and claim everything is fine.
It showed me what happens when grief is treated like disobedience.

I will not carry their shame any longer.

What happened to him was not my failure.
What happened to me was not my making.
And what they fear is not my truth — it’s their own reflection.

I survived them.
I told the story anyway.
I built a life anyway.
And I continue to name the unnamed — because silence never saved me.

If you’re reading this and you’ve been blamed for your own pain —

If you’ve been scapegoated, rewritten, erased —

Let me say what you may never have heard:

You are not the problem.
You are the proof.
You are the echo of a story they tried to bury.
And you are still here.
Still sacred. Still sovereign. Still whole.

And they? They can keep their blame.
Because I’ve finally laid it down.