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 from high school. I built my muscle through grueling manual labor, and I gained significant pride in my body. My body's agility, strength and skill helped me support my only child, to whom I was a single parent. It afforded us a lifestyle of traveling, shopping, and exploring. I showed off my muscle tone, basking in the attention of men who often loved me for little else.
When I was 32, I visited my hometown of Globe, Arizona, after welding on an ice-skating rink that I was helping to build in Oregon. During this visit, my friend lost control of her vehicle while I was in the passenger seat. I crushed my C4 vertebrae on impact, rendering me a complete quadriplegic.
My paralysis diagnosis derailed the trajectory of my life. The journey toward accepting the myriad of changes was more challenging than any physical feat I had ever attempted.
The independent and athletic part of my identity was gone. I felt grateful that I still had my intellect and my relationships with my loved ones, But I missed my able body, and the autonomy that came with it.
After becoming paralyzed, I cried when I saw my reflection in the mirror and watched my muscles dissipate in the shower. I hated my stubborn body, which refused to get the memos my brain desperately tried to send. I was convinced that no one else would love my body as is.
Over time, I realized that the people who truly loved me never did so for my able body. They readily accepted me, long before I could accept myself in my newly paralyzed body.
Other people disappeared from my life, and strangers treated me differently in passing than they had during my life on legs. As an able-bodied woman, I had been spoiled by “pretty privilege” and protected from the bias that many people hold. As I sat in my wheelchair, I was snubbed, marginalized, and ignored in public. Men seemed to no longer see me as a sexual and sensual being. I was in my head about other people’s judgments.
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It took me a few years of being in this body to begin to fully appreciate my existence within it.
I learned self-love through meditation and philosophy. I worked on letting go. I cultivated gratitude and grace for other people and myself. I learned to love my body beyond surface-level reasons.
When I look in the mirror now, I see a delicate creature with unmatchable wit, talent, and resolve. My body is as soft and supple as a flower, unlike the sculpted muscle that I once took pride in. But I discovered beauty in this new body, especially since it contains a genuine force to be reckoned with within.
I feel proud of this body, which carried me across steel beams 80 feet in the air for a decade of my life. This body jumped off bridges, swam in lakes, hiked mountains, birthed a child, and survived a crushed vertebrae an inch away from the brain stem.
I look at this body with love now, choosing to celebrate it for all its achievements.
This body is deserving of love, regardless of its dysfunction.
I choose to celebrate its beauty, exactly as is.
Cassandra Brandt is an Arizona-based author and advocate for marginalized people. You can find her memoir, Iron Girl: Tomboy, Tradeswoman, Tetraplegic, on Amazon.