Persevering, with flair

This story is part of a series of occasional features about local creators who’ve built substantial followings on social media.

Three years ago, Syndney Anne Bennett wouldn’t have imagined she’d be deciding what cane to use when she gets ready to go out.

Today, the 25-year-old Moscow resident leads discussions with her nearly 280K Instagram followers about the realities of relying on mobility aids — including that, when it comes to canes “I want people to know it can be fun.”

She didn’t always have that perspective, but she said sharing her story on social media helped her process and cope with what she was experiencing.

Early on, “I felt very insecure about using a cane as a young person,” she said.

Her husband encouraged her to get a cane she liked, and she searched social media for people who looked like her, discovering the actor Selma Blair, who uses a cane when her multiple sclerosis flares. Blair was “so poised and so stylish” with her cane, Bennett said, it helped change the way she viewed using one.

She has a collection of them now, in a variety of styles and finishes, and chooses which to use based on her mood and what she’s wearing.

Difficult and scary

Bennett’s issues began with chronic pain about year before she and her husband, Colton, got married. She became disabled two weeks after her honeymoon and just four months before her husband deployed with the U.S. military, a time she recalls as “very difficult and very scary.”

“I was kind of navigating my first year of disability alone,” she said.

They lived in Kansas, where he was stationed at Fort Riley, when she got sick, returning to Moscow when his deployment was over, where she recently finished a degree at New Saint Andrews College.

Her symptoms started with paralysis in her hands. Soon she lost her ability to speak, then to walk. Then came seizures and juvenile regression — an unconscious return to behaviors of a much younger person.

Bennett’s diagnosis, functional neurological disorder, or FND, often left her with more questions than answers. Explanations bounced between psychological and neurological changes, but regardless of the cause, her symptoms continued.

She researched FND and learned the medical consensus about it had changed over the past couple of decades. Bottom line, Bennet said: Her brain functions differently from a healthy person’s.

“My symptoms can fluctuate a lot,” she said, so she often uses a wheelchair, or cane, when she goes out.

She has nonepileptic seizures, an example of which she shared in a video on her Instagram account, that can cause her to lose the ability to move or speak afterward. She sometimes experiences hallucinations and still deals with chronic pain. .

Turning hate on its head

A year ago, Bennett had a baby girl, Hadassah, and many of her Instagram posts revolve around parenting with a disability, something she said she rarely saw while she was pregnant.

The majority of the comments and direct messages she receives from viewers are positive, she said, many from people with similar disability issues.

She also gets some hate.

People have criticized her for having a baby, claiming she can’t properly care for a child. In response, Bennett posts about how she does exactly that, including creating safe places in each room of their home where she can lie down with her baby when she needs to.

Turning hateful comments into an opportunity to be encouraging or informative “gives back power and control,” she said. “If you are posting this out there for the world to see publicly, then I should be able to use it for something good.”

She collects screenshots of negative comments as fodder for future posts.

“Even the true things that you share can be twisted,” she said “So I want to really push against that with my content.”

As a Christian, she said, she has a particular focus on being “positive and redemptive,” exploring how God is working through her challenges.

Tackling challenges

Many of Moscow’s old buildings lack accessibility, Bennett said, but just getting to them is a challenge in itself: Navigating cracked and uneven sidewalks can be the hardest part of going out.

“Moscow’s a very walkable town, so I thought it would be very easy to get around in a wheelchair,” she said. “But just because a town is walkable doesn’t mean it’s necessarily wheelchair accessible.”

Faculty members at New Saint Andrews College “bent over backward for me,” she said, but with flights of stairs between her and some of her classrooms, getting to class could be difficult.

Sometimes a practical solution means finding another option: Accessibility factored into how Bennett and her husband chose a church. They used to attend Christ Church downtown, up three flights of stairs, but now go to an affiliated parish, Trinity Reformed Church.

“There’s only so much you can do with stuff like that,” she said.

One tool that rarely fails when tackling day-to-day challenges is humor. Bennett recently shared a video in which she recounts a comically slow shopping trip on a store-provided electric scooter with a low battery.

“You know that scene in ‘Despicable Me’ where he has the little motorized scooter and gives his rousing speech and then starts rolling away from the minions, but it’s so anticlimactic because he’s moving so slowly?” she asks in the video. “That’s how I felt the entire time.”

Don’t quit your day job

While not a huge part of their household income, Bennett’s social media endeavors help supplement her husband’s earnings as an Army reservist and pre-law student at the University of Idaho.

She’s grateful for the unexpected following she’s amassed on Instagram, Bennett said, but the rewards have come more from sharing her experiences and encouraging others than financially.

“I definitely wouldn’t quit your day job,” she said. “I pay for our date nights (with social media income). Things like that.”

Even with a large following, she said, payments from Instagram are inconsistent. Sometimes the app awards bonuses for views, but it’s been back and forth on that. Typically, she makes pennies on each post.

She’d like to hire a social media manager someday, she said, but for now she handles everything herself.

“It’s not something that I’m focusing on, because that would stress me out,” she said. “I know YouTube is more consistent, but I don’t have a big enough following there.”

Bennett typically records a week’s worth or so of videos at a time so she always has something to post — ideally once a day — even when she’s not up to creating new content.

She occasionally has created sponsored content but is selective about who she’ll work with. She said she only recommends products she uses, such as a babywearing wrap she can tuck Hadassah into even while using her wheelchair.

“I take my brand very seriously,” she said.

Stone (she/her) can be reached at mstone@inland360.com or (208) 848-2244.