Carrying around dead weight

I've always found the expression "carrying around dead weight" odd. What does it mean? I watch too much true crime, so I can't help but associate it with murder when I hear it. Recently, I heard someone use it to refer to something that no longer served them, and they needed to part with. (likely the more common and less morbid association to make) It made me think of all the heavy things I've carried over the last nine years, none of which were dead bodies, some of which were almost as morbid.  

At each part of this journey, I carried around some kind of dead weight. First, it was a leg riddled with cancer. Then it was a brand new fake leg I didn't yet know how to operate, now, every year or so, it's a new check socket made of heavy, hard plastic. I'm wearing one of those bulky and nearly impossible to work out in check sockets at the moment, and thankfully, it's only temporary while a new one that perfectly fits the current size and shape of my residual limb is made in some really cool gadget warehouse.

All of these weights came and went over the years, some harder to bear than others. But the weight of cancer and disability is forever. And there is no device or surgery for the parts of it that linger. You have to train yourself to lift it every day until it becomes second nature, and you mostly do it without thinking. Understanding that you are in fact, so much more than what you are tied to.

Everyone has something they don't want holding them down, something they don't know how to shake or are stuck with due to their circumstance. It's knowing the difference that's important. Just because you can't part with it doesn't mean it has to define you. Cancer has left my body, but its ghost lives with me. Over time, I have learned to share space with the aspects of it that refuse to go; just like my disability, I go to mental boot camp with it all. I am bigger than all of this. I am stronger than all of this. I am happier than all of this. And just because we are roommates, cancer, disability, and I, doesn't mean I have to acknowledge them while I wash the dishes.