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About Me

Welcome, and thanks for exploring my portfolio. Words are my passion, and using them to advocate for causes I care about and help others heal is my agenda. I'm an author, scholar with a background in sociology and a spinal cord injury survivor. Born and raised in the Copper Hills of Arizona, I worked as a traveling tradeswoman in commercial steel for ten years. Today I'm a freelance writer, an advocate for people with disabilities and an aspiring trauma coach. I'm passionate about mental health, social justice, ecology and animal rights. Interests include utilizing philosophy for mental health, studying the intersection of religious faith and psychology, and paying forward the peace I'm finding in this life. I'm a mother to a kind and intelligent daughter, who has blessed my life with two precious grandchildren.

My Spinal Cord Injury

People sometimes assume I fell from the steel but it was just the wrong passenger seat I slid into that fateful night in May 2015. I was 32 years old. I had been working on the road up in Oregon, my 13 year old daughter in tow, when a friend's sudden death sent me tearing down the coast to support my community back home. After the service, I was riding in a friend's vehicle when she took her eyes off the road. I grabbed the wheel to avoid a head on collision with another vehicle, and we flipped instead. 

My C4 vertebrae was crushed on impact. A helicopter landed in the nearby baseball field. Paramedics rushed me on a stretcher down the dark street to meet it. I was terrified. A few weeks later I learned the odds of regaining any sensory or motor function below my shoulders were slim to none.  After pushing through intense rehab in which I was weaned from the ventilator and learned how to operate a power wheelchair with my head, I moved home to live with family.  In the years that followed I turned to philosophy, psychology, and cathartic writing to cope, eventually furthering my education, publishing multiple books, becoming a freelance writer, and getting involved in advocacy for my disabled community.

My spinal cord injury affects almost every aspect of my life, whether it's health and care concerns or trying to exist in an ableist society. I have found some peace with my disability in solidarity with and advocacy for my spinal cord injury community. In my personal life I've also turned to Buddhist thought and Stoic philosophy to cultivate endurance.

My Religious Trauma Journey

OC87 Recovery Diaries •

Religious Trauma, When Faith Hurts: Testimony of an EXvangelical

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...

Chronicling my Journey

SPINALpedia •

From Institution to Independence

As I rolled my power wheelchair through the doorway to my first independent home in more than four years, a sea of emotions swept over me. Pride. I worked hard for this moment. I advocated for the home based services I needed in my community. I took on multiple part time remote jobs. I jumped through all the hoops to qualify for this low income accessible apartment. It wasn’t a nice house like I could have afforded a decade ago, as a tradeswoman. But it was my own space in this world.
New Mobility •

Making Peace with My Spinal Cord Injury

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
Her View From Home •

When You Can't Hug: A Post-Disability Mother-Daughter Relationship

The kind of mother I was at 32 was a strong, single, independent, provider type. I was a tradeswoman. I had begun a career in structural steel at age 21, and it took me all up and down the West Coast.

My daughter got everything she wanted, except my time and patience.

We were emotionally estranged. I thought such was inevitable with the approach of adolescence, and I was more consumed with my own adventures, part-time partners, and destructive habits than I was with parenting and bonding.

The
Wheelchair Accessible Lifestyle •

A Tale of Two Assisted Living Homes

After six years of navigating complete C-4 quadriplegic life I found myself in need of moving into assisted living two years ago.

I didn’t do any research before moving into the first place with a vacancy. I was just glad they would accept me, with my high level of care. Many assisted living homes are basically retirement homes and many residents don’t need a lot of care.

I had been warned this place was ran by rather negligent management and sorely understaffed, but the contract said ‘24 hour
Christopher Reeves Foundation •

Discovering Self-Love and Accepting My Post-SCI Body

It is human nature to accept ourselves more readily when we see that other people accept us. I have experienced this need for validation since I was a new kid in elementary school. This need still eats at me, even when I appear to have it all together.

When society told me that I needed to be pretty, I listened. When the media told me I had to be thin, I ate less. When boys started noticing me, I thought that was what being a woman was all about.

I became an ironworker soon after I graduated f
New Mobility •

Sacrifice and Strength: A Mother and Daughter's Journey Through SCI

Rebuilding a life following a high-level spinal cord injury is never easy. For Cassandra Brandt, a single mother, and her daughter Haley, America’s worsening caregiver crisis forced them into a situation that no family should have to face.

Cassandra: The summer my daughter and I were 13 and 32 our lives were swept out from under us, and we were left struggling to adjust to unimaginable change.

I was a single mom putting myself through university by night and opens in a new windowwelding by day
Wheelchair Accessible Lifestyle •

A Quadriplegics Dreams of A Life of Passion and Purpose

“It was a straight downhill roll to the highway, and if I timed it right and gained enough speed, surely I could collide with a speeding semi-truck.”

Five years after the car accident that left me a C4 complete quadriplegic, I was losing my “why” to live and experiencing fleeting ideas about “how” to end my life.

A caregiver would have actually to show up and get me out of bed first. That was no easy feat; a primary source of my soul-sucking depression was directly associated with being stuck
New Mobility •

Self-Worth, Shame & Spinal Cord Injury

I was raised with the example of a hard-working, blue-collar father, and I went into the trades at 21. As I welded my way up the West Coast, young daughter in tow, I adopted this perspective that over-working oneself to death was an admirable way to go. My self-worth felt determined by how much I was contributing and participating. This applied to both my then-career in commercial iron and my anticipated career as a writer.

I never imagined the former would be cut so brutally short. I sustained
Ability360 | Phoenix, AZ •

Reversed Roles Parenting with Disability

It’s Saturday morning and Haley, my 15-year-old daughter, comes to my room. We talk softly as she gives me my morning meds and empties my catheter bag. She brushes my hair and applies my makeup. As she dresses me we discuss school and her boyfriend. My brother, Efrim joins us and transfers me to my powerchair.

Haley is my only child and I am her only parent. She was 13 when I became paralyzed from the shoulders down as a passenger in a rollover car-accident. Before then, she travelled around th
Ability360 | Phoenix, AZ •

Moving On and Going Out

360 Perspective: Moving On and Going Out

On Mother’s Day, my best friend Heather and I returned to the street where we flipped her SUV exactly two years ago. I remember being suddenly incapable of moving and the medivac helicopter’s propellers chopping through the dark sky. I remember terror.

I crushed my C4 vertebrae, rendering me unable to move or feel my body from the shoulders down. Terrifying weeks in ICU and many more in a nursing home followed the neck surgery that had saved my life. I