CONTENT BY CASSANDRA

When people ask me why I have trauma from my youth in the Evangelical community, I really don’t know where to start.The megachurch Easter production I attended as a preteen, watching actor Jesus whipped bloody on his way to the cross? My eyes had nearly swollen shut from sobbing in the church van on the way home. A youth pastor had pressed a hammer into the hand of each child at an Evangelical camp I’d attended the summer prior, and my guilt and shame over the torture and death of Christ was pal...

Cassandra Brandt discusses the utilization of Greco-Roman Stoic philosophy to build resilience and find purpose and peace following a life altering spinal cord injury.

My mental health took a dive the summer I was thirty-two years old. The reaction was understandable. I had broken my neck in a car accident. My spinal cord injury was cervical and complete. My body had lost all motor and sensory function from the chest down.

Outside the window the summer sky is impossibly blue and oblivious to my plight on this bed. Sorrow pierces my heart, and a sob catches in my throat. The skilled nursing facility is alive with staff rushing about hustling residents into showers, pushing med carts, tending to droning call bells and haunting cries. The surgeon’s voice echoes in my mind every moment: words like “permanent” and “complete.”


Closing my eyes, I see myself on my feet, in my work boots and harness on the iron. Longing

Like so much in this dystopia, care is about money. And disability is most certainly expensive. The durable medical equipment, medication, personal care, transportation, home modifications—the shopping list goes on. And everything tagged “accessible” is marked way up. Until I became disabled myself, I didn’t understand the extent to which ableism permeates people’s lives, including our wallets.

These aren’t expenses that the average individual