Inside Cassie

Another letter from the insurance company that they cannot process my request for approval to get facial feminization surgery in Spain. This is the third one, all because of their lack of understanding on how the process works. My gender team confirmed it to me a while back, this insurance company is the only one who has this problem. They are hard at work to resolve this with them, but that takes time. It doesn’t help me.

When I went down this path to have my FFS surgery done there, I was elated. They even had a date available for me that was already so close: 21/05/2025, only 3 months away at the time that I heard that date. It felt like maybe I was going to make it through this after all. The months preceding that moment had been… rough. If you are reading this (unless you stumbled across this blog by chance — welcome btw 😉 ), you are one of my closest friends, meaning you already know what happened back then, so I won’t elaborate on it further.

But then the administrative part reared its head. An MDO had to be done first, paperwork prepared, and then filed with the insurance company. They had to give their approval before the surgery date, otherwise I would never get the money refunded. Time crept by, and before I knew it, there was only one ‘sensible’ option: I had to release the set date, because otherwise I could not move it anymore without losing my deposit.

Letting go of that date took me to some dark places, but I held out hope. Hope that it would somehow be ok. That the insurance company would come through at some point, and my new date would not be so far away… Every time I send in the application I held on to that hope. Every time I received another of their letters that hope was crushed. And every time I felt more diminished, I became smaller and smaller, more frail, less me…

And now, today, I got another of their letters, same as before. Despite the added (SIGNED) letter from my gender team, explaining everything they needed to know. They still send me the SAME AS BEFORE! The same GODDAMN MOTHERFUCKING letter!
I sit here, writing this because any other outlet I would regret afterwards, but I find myself wanting to throw stuff. I want to demolish everything in my apartment, screaming out all of my emotions as I do… until there is nothing left inside, even me.

For most of my life, I hardly felt my emotions, then I spend 10 years fighting and working on myself to find my way back to them. In the end, it was HRT that brought them back to me. Most days I am grateful for that… but today… today I want to cut out my heart, because feeling nothing is better than feeling this.

Because right now, I don’t feel like a person anymore. I feel like I am suffocating, which is how I have been feeling for a while now. I am afraid that I might become so small, I stop existing all together.

I know reading this will make you worry, and I am truly sorry for that, but I have to get this out. I have to get this out and put it somewhere where I know it will be seen. A few days ago, I read a paragraph in a book I was reading ‘Starfish’ that felt like it had been pulled out of my mind:

I’ve always felt like I desperately needed to say my feelings out loud—to form the words and get them out of me, because they’ve always felt like dark clouds in my head that contaminate everything around them.

I need someone to know what is going on inside me…