"Well being... being older, being 64 actually, has probably made the depression better just because I have survived. I've managed through an awful lot. Um, and being a female that... that even makes me even more proud because, um, as... as a woman, there’s been an awful lot of crap in my life."
"Being a woman and being ace have certainly like mixed in a lot of places in my life.... like the expectation to have sex or to be a certain way about sex is something... for women it's something that makes sexuality complicated because on the one hand, like I don't like... I'm not sex repulsed, so sex is sex, it's whatever. But I've had people respond like, very negatively to the idea that I don't want to have sex just because, and the idea that I might just want to have sex just because."
"A lot of the things that I appreciate in media that are coded as femme that I’m attracted... are also things that like I very strongly believed I could and should be able, and in some ways was able to find in masculine things."
"Sometimes I have like a headspace where I escape to where everything is…like magical and I like to escape to there, but then I come back to real life and I feel like a fairy with its wings cut off or I don’t know a mermaid out of water. I don’t feel like I belong anywhere."
"When I was a little like my mom, she was like, an authority, you know, her word was, you know the truth and she… she just came off as powerful, menacing like this… almost like tyrannical person… when I was a child. More and more like I see her growing old and I see myself, you know, living my life and you know, and gaining confidence in myself and she’s… I can see her just for her… I can see her vulnerabilities now and she’s not as threatening as she was before, like when I was little."
"It was nice kind of in a way because it showed me that I... like, it sounds like sad, but it was kind of showed me that you have to rely on yourself, like you might think that your family loves you unconditionally, but they might not."
“They work on... levels of rage and sadness and joy and fear and love that are not societally acceptable for modern 21st century Western people... People say exactly what they mean and they say it to the gods and they say.. they break open their own ribs and show everyone your heart and are like, “this is what I'm feeling. This is exactly what I'm going to do. I am feeling... I am feeling this feeling so heavily that it is going to shake the earth and rent and the heavens”. And I think everyone feels like that. Everyone has that capacity for emotion and we are never allowed to express it because we're overdramatic or we’re sensationalizing or we're... making it up.”
"It's a question of... what do you do with that sort of anger? Within the context of the relationship, it led to me lashing out against the abuse, but in ways that I actually ended up feeling guilty for... and that's part of what kept me in the relationship for so long-- because of my guilt, I felt that I didn't deserve any better."
"If I ever want to heal myself from my own destructiveness, I need to take responsibility for what I’ve done in service of my eating disorder and forgive past me for turning to such destructive means to handle life, since these measures were all I knew to survive each day." "So many people in the recovery community preach that you should love your body the way that it is and that your body is perfect the way it’s supposed to be naturally and that’s obviously not helpful for trans people because our bodies are the things that are causing us so much pain"
The Cassandra Transcripts 