Brandi McBride: There’s Strength in the StruggleBrandi McBride: There’s Strength in the Struggle
Struggle Well Podcast
Air Force veteran and metastatic cancer patient Brandi McBride talks about combat, divorce, illness and how Boulder Crest and gardening helped her turn struggle into strength. The conversation highlights posttraumatic growth, everyday joy and the choice to learn from hardship rather than be defined by it.
42:38•9 Sept 2026
Brandi McBride on Cancer, Combat and Finding Strength in the Struggle
Episode Overview
- Struggle can become a source of growth rather than something to simply endure.
- Symbolic, physical practices (like the labyrinth and stone) can help release long-held emotional weight.
- Gardening shows how things that appear dead or broken can return stronger, mirroring posttraumatic growth.
- Focusing on how you react to events, rather than trying to control everything, can lighten the mental load.
- Expecting that life will bring hardship can make setbacks easier to face and turn into learning moments.
“You don’t have the joy without the struggle.”
What makes a recovery story truly inspiring? This conversation on the Struggle Well Podcast follows Air Force veteran and gardener Brandi McBride as she talks about turning years of hardship into strength, meaning, and even art. You’ll hear Brandi walk through her unusual path into the Air Force, moving from a university “run club” to ROTC and into combat support work that ranged from morale events to mortuary affairs in Iraq.
She describes nights on the runway strapping flags to caskets, going straight back to boost morale for troops who often had no idea a loss had just occurred. Her focus was on looking after everyone else, and she admits she didn’t really process her own experiences until much later.
Life after service brought fresh challenges: adjusting to civilian life in Michigan, struggling to translate military skills into a job, then being diagnosed with breast cancer at 31 while raising two very young children. Later, metastatic cancer spread to her bones and brain, shifting her entire outlook on time, health and what makes “a great day”.
As she puts it, “You don’t have the joy without the struggle.” A turning point came at Boulder Crest’s Warrior PATHH programme, where a labyrinth walk and a symbolic stone helped her “leave” the weight of divorce, combat, loss and old anger. That experience fed into her love of gardening, where mums, tulips and vines became living examples of posttraumatic growth: plants look dead, are battered, divided and frozen, yet rise stronger each year.
Brandi now channels that same energy into community work, veteran support and large-scale art installations built from broken structures and thriving plants. Her attitude is clear: “When you hear that thing happen and you’re like, ‘You’re kidding me,’… it’s just, all right, what am I going to learn through this?” If you’re facing your own mix of struggle and recovery, could Brandi’s way of finding strength in every setback shift how you see your day?
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