Janine Shepherd: A broken body isn’t a broken person

What do you do when everything you’ve worked toward in life is gone in an instant? Janine Shepherd was hit by a truck while training for the Olympics and rendered a partial paraplegic. In the days following the accident, she wondered why she’d want to fight to live if that meant life in a broken body, but she did so. “If we are to move towards our collective bliss, it’s time we shed our focus on the physical,” Shepherd said. Out of the hospital, but in a body cast and wheelchair, Shepherd saw a plane fly overhead. At that moment she reasoned that if she could not walk, then she might as well learn to fly. And she did so.