This is a post I've needed to write... well, since I started this blog. Since I started my transition, really. A few months after I started Cassidy's Quest, with the encouragement of my therapist M and, particularly, my friend Kelli (of The Good, The Bad, The Blonde - hello, Miss K, if you're still out there in the blogosphere and ever come across this) I began writing what turned into a series of posts that I eventually grouped together as The Chronicles of Cass.
They were, for all intents and purposes, my autobiography.
But there was one very important chapter of my life that remained undocumented this entire time.
The beginning.
I wouldn't - or, more accurately, couldn't - allow myself to go back there.
Why?
I realized upon reflection that the other posts in The Chronicles of Cass series weren't writing for me; they were exorcisms. I had never shared any hint of the stories they tell with anyone - not once, not ever.
My therapist, M, told me more than once that she could not fathom how I was able to hold them, and the attendant emotions, inside all those years. My friend F, who likely knows me better than anyone (and who is himself a therapist), has told me the same thing.
I did not cry from the age of 12 until I was in my mid-thirties. During those years, I can now see that I was completely shut down emotionally. It began, in retrospect, as a matter of survival: I shut out the "bad" feelings because, as you will see, I had no way to adequately process them. The problem with that, of course, is you can't eliminate only one type of emotion; you wind up shutting down *all* emotions.
These posts, then, are my attempt to finally address the time in my life when I came to realize that not only was I different from everyone I knew, in ways I couldn't possibly understand, let alone change, but that I would pay a heavy price because of those differences... but eventually gain so much more.
This is the story of how it all began, split into three parts:
Thank you in advance for reading these.
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