Cass Midgley

“It was 2016 and I was beginning to face my chronic fears. Luckily, Cass was there with his microphone.”

Religious Trauma, et al

I knew since 13 that I had a confusing relationship with my biofam’s religion: Christianity. I began to doubt it all even at that young age but didn’t have the support I needed to healthfully engage in doubt. I ended up going through an intense and traumatic experience of trying to appease the invisible man in my head. Once in my mid 20’s, I finally left doing conversion-based missionary work in Mexico and began to disown the label of Christian without much thought other than “this is driving me insane”. Two marriages and an eating disorder later, I started to realize that I wasn’t just moving past it all. I needed help.

My Trapeze (Fear-Facing) Chapter

So in 2016, I decided to start engaging with my fears. I began looking more sincerely for religious trauma resources. Best I had found were angry ex-Christian podcasts and forums. I had a local religious trauma support group but they had very little structure and it often turned into a unfacilitated vent session. I finally found the podcast “Life After God” with Ryan Bell. I deeply appreciated his soft touch as he interviewed others and spoke about leaving faith (little did I know that I wouldn’t experience a significant, personal catharsis from that trauma until early 2024). On May 4, 2016, Ryan interviewed Cass Midgley and Bob Pondillo of the Everyone’s Agnostic podcast. I haven’t relistened to this interview in a while (and, frankly, won’t), but I recall how it made me feel. I was really interested in Cass’ and Bob’s vibe. Cass was this heavy and passionate thinker; Bob was this innocent secular voice expressing dismay while the ex-religious voices on the show shared their experiences. I began faithfully listening to Everyone’s Agnostic every week. If I had to guess, I bet that episode 99 was the first one I listened to.

Taking the Microphone

Bravery (& terror) washed over me as I emailed Cass in June 2016 asking if I could be a guest on his show and talk about my religious trauma. I was so intimidated and was sure that he would not be interested since I was some no-name person. I was sure that he had better people to talk to. But as he says, “we talk with people you don’t know about something no one wants to talk about”. They interviewed me on June 18, 2016, and my episode was released on July 18th, 2016. When he told me it was live, my heart dropped into my feet and I listened to it over and over again for weeks, hearing my voice speak the truth of my experience. Here’s an excerpt from the description of the episode: “the Marie we witness here today is really bright, really courageous, and is all out fucks for the cultural standards that oppressed as a woman for the first 30 years of her life—and she expressly says so in this episode. She drops more f-bombs than any guest in our history, even more than me.“ He always believed in me and hyped me up, as he did most everyone he met.

Finding Community

Cass started a Facebook group on September 2, 2016, for all the listeners to get to know one another. It was such an amazing space to connect with others who resonated with the show, with Cass, and an opportunity to meet these “people you don’t know” whose story you had heard and felt deep in your bones. This was the first time I was part of a community like this and it was such a special place for me.

Taking the Microphone, Again

Just a half year after my first interview on Everyone’s Agnostic, my husband and I decided to renegotiate our monogamous marriage and explore ethical non-monogamy. I was motivated to do this because of the panic attacks I was having when anything intimate happened. I grew up in purity culture in the 90’s in evangelical Christianity… it’s a whole thing. I reached out to Cass since he had invited former guests to come back on for follow-ups. Plus, I was still delirious with desire to speak more after that first episode. I told him that I had since become non-monogamous and he was RIVETED. Cass loves salacious and edgy things! He invited me back on. We recorded on October 16, 2017 and my second episode with him was released on December 8th, 2017.

Scheming

June 23, 2018, Cass had announced that his co-host, Bob Pondillo, was going to be moving out of Nashville to Wisconsin and would no longer be co-hosting the show. For the next couple of months, we listened as Cass took over the show entirely. You would hear him express some kind of burnout energy. At the time, I was working at a company as an executive assistant and doing well at my job. However, I was really unfulfilled personally. I began to think on asking Cass if he wanted any help administering the podcast once I met him in person. I was so worried that he’d be like, “guffah! pishposh! I do not need you!” But as my story goes, I planned to do it despite the fear.

Meeting Cass & The Retreat

People had been encouraging Cass to host some kind of retreat for everyone who listened to the show to get to know each other. Cass may be a “leader”, but planning isn’t really his forte. Luckily, someone took the reigns (thanks Charles!) and coordinated our very first Everyone’s Agnostic retreat in the Smokey Mountains of Tennessee in the fall of 2018. As soon as that conversation began, I knew I was going to go no matter what. I wanted to meet Cass, I wanted to connect with all the other people that related to me. Up until that point, I hadn’t really found a community with whom to process my religious trauma. I signed up and flew Nashville that October.

I met Cass for the first time in a parking lot in Nashville. I had gotten a rental car because my social anxiety at the time (and still now, to be honest) was such that I needed to feel totally autonomous while traveling. A bunch of us gathered in that parking lot to begin a caravan drive from Nashville to the smokies.

At the time, I had tension with my biological family and had been projecting some of my paternal deficit onto Cass. I had been really looking forward to meeting him because I wanted to feed that need for paternal love. I was SO excited to meet Cass. He was my HERO. Listening to the show for the last two years had been so encouraging and cathartic. Plus being about to speak publicly about my experiences in evangelical Christianity had been such a release.

However, Cass is just a dude. He’s just a dude. Just a person like all of us. I was a bit surprised when I met him. I expected this smooth, calm cowboy but he was (in my opinion) a squirrely ADHD man. And he wasn’t there to father me or nurture me, though he often did. I was so nervous around him and was dying for his attention yet would be very restrained and guarded. He was a confusing presence for me (or more likely, I was confused). His podcast presented a very curated version of himself, but in person, he was something very different.

Regardless, I asked Cass if he could use some help with his podcast. I told him I am a professional administrative worker. I could schedule his interviews, get him on other podcasts to promote his own, create social media content, find people to interview, manage his website, update his branding, etc. I thought I’d really have to make my case. But as he usually does with my ideas, he shrugged and said, sure, okay, with an ambivalent energy.

the show

Cass gave me the passwords to his Gmail, his website, his LibSyn account, everything. He was not difficult at all to work for cuz he didn’t really give a fuck. I wanted to help him with the show and so he let me help him with the show. However, it was barely a month before I brought up (and I can’t remember how it came up) the idea of me co-hosting along with him. He hadn’t thought to replace his co-host Bob, but again, in true Cass fashion, if I had an idea, he was like, sure, okay. And I co-hosted with him for the first time on November 24, 2018 under the pseudonym “Marie D’Elephant” since I didn’t feel like it was socially safe to be out. All in all, we did about 30 episodes together (starting at episode 226). Given where I’m at in my life, I find it a little hard to remember these episodes and how I felt about it. I was nervous every time. I felt like an imposter. I also would get frustrated with Cass and his perspectives. He could be an all-or-nothing, binary thinker at times. Whenever I would challenge him on that, he would call me wise and a genius.

Spin-off

Cass told me in the fall of 2019 that he was done doing Everyone’s Agnostic. He was just over it. We talked about whether I’d take over and keep it going but he preferred to button it up and close it up. So we released our last episode on October 27, 2019, with a final-final dual release of the first episode of my new podcast, Everyone’s Autonomous. I kept that going for a time, I don’t really remember. It then merged into “Marie, Myself, & I”. Then I ended it altogether. Honestly, I’m working on starting up a new podcast but having a hard time getting it going. I sent the draft description to Cass a month ago and he told me it was “meh” and that he wouldn’t listen to it. He was always honest. I am not mad about that.

Special

Honestly,… I felt famous being affiliated with Cass and his podcast. And I guess I was in a small way to a small group of people for a short period of time. Both with my work with Cass and then later when working to build up Dave Warnock’s death (aka life) empire of Dying Out Loud. Honestly, when people would reach out to us (or even just to me) and say how much our conversations were impacting them, I had to mute the emotional impact. I had a hard time believing it. I had a hard time knowing what to say. You’re welcome? But now, as I write this, as I pull together the hyperlinks of interviews, the pictures over 6 years of friendship, the date ranges where we visited each other, … and as I have Facebook open on another screen and notifications popping off of people posting on Cass’ wall, on the podcast group, on pictures that I posted on his wall,… my god, his impact was far reaching and deep. It really has me wondering if he also felt a guard up against knowing how much he was and had impacted others’ lives with his authentic self. I didn’t always like him. He wasn’t easy for me to talk to often. He regularly reminded me of my dad in good and bad ways. There is still more that I was hoping to share with him of myself, but I was still too scared to be as real with him as he was with me. I was inspired by how committed he was to living honestly, living by his principals, and generously sharing his experiences and insights with the world. I struggle to understand the logic that led him to decide to take his life. To have planned it out as far in advance as he did and to have non-chalantly talked about this plan for a year to the people who loved him the most. When he told me about his plan, I silently rolled my eyes at him. Just another weird over-intellectualized idea from Cass. Playing with fire, though, man… didn’t feel as harmless as his other perspectives I disagreed with. I knew that I couldn’t be responsible for his choices nor change his mind. He doesn’t do well with people who directly oppose the odd things he may say or believe. So I tried to keep the me inside calm, not freak out or attack or save him, but just hear him out and try to understand. He didn’t want to be here anymore. And that stayed true for a long period of time. And it appears that with what he felt was a sound mind and body, he made a choice he deliberated on for a long time. It’s honestly very difficult for me to wrap my head around how I feel about this. It’s complicated. If you’re reading this, I’m sure you have very complicated emotions as well. I want to put a bow on this. I want to write him off as mentally ill. But I’m not sure if he was and, what’s more, I’m not sure it would serve me to arrive to that conclusion. I feel pressure to process his choice in some highly philosophical way. But one thing I’ve learned from my relationship with Cass is how to take up space. Because Cass knew how to take up space. I’m learning to do the same. And my space, me, I don’t have a philosophical take on this. I just feel how I feel. I’m sad. I’m angry. I’m scared. I feel regret. I feel confusion. I feel pressure. I feel watched. He left such a legacy and he let me share in it for a short time. I still struggle to accept that he saw me as an equal,… often he would say I was lightyears ahead of him and everyone else. I don’t know why he left. I know I’ve wanted to leave so many times. I get why someone would want to leave. I guess I just decided that placing bets on life possibly getting better is worth the suffering of not leaving prematurely. You leave and you remove all potential. I’m also scared when I think about what I would be feeling if I were in his position and felt the same need and perspective as he did. It terrifies me to think of ending my life early just cuz I don’t think it’ll get any better and I don’t have any energy to ride it out a bit longer. I have been choosing to stay alive despite darkness inside me for decades. Not bragging, not comparing. Just trying to understand him. But I don’t think I’ll ever understand him. I never have. He bobs and weaves around my chronic attempts to psychoanalyze and diagnose him. He was very HIM.

What do I do with his death? Do I do what he’d “want” me to do? Honestly, I don’t think he gives a FUCK what I do to process/celebrate his life. That’s the thing. He left behind a legacy of authenticity, autonomy, and freedom. He left behind a legacy of being yourself, even if it’s messy. I don’t know that I need to choose right now to make some kind of intention integration of his life and legacy in my life. I think that’s already a done deal. My life trajectory completely changed because of him. I still can’t believe this cool podcast guy with the smokey voice thinks I’m a genius, a powerhouse, and would share any of his resources with me. He may not have deconstructed the misogyny completely from himself, but he fucking knew how to show up and support people. Even now, I’m like, should I be talking about how he still had unprocessed misogynistic behaviors? Seems mean to say. But first, I would say it to his face. Second, he’d agree. Third, he’d want me to tell the truth. He’d want me to “expand the talk-aboutable” .

Fuck. I don’t know what else to say. I’m just rattling out whatever comes up right now. I don’t even know how to end this post. I guess partially I don’t want to end it because I worry when I will get a chance to process his life again. Is this the end? Just this little blog post? Well, no, I’m going to his funeral next month and I will grieve with my friends. I guess something I’m noticing is this need to behave in a way that Cass would have behaved in order to “honor” or “remember” him. But you know what, just because he died doesn’t mean he’s a saint that I should now start to incorporate into myself. He is already a part of me. He has already influenced me and helped me become who I am today. The best way to honor his life (whether he was dead or alive) is to continue to care for myself, recover myself from religious abuse and childhood neglect, support others (when/how I can) who are also trying to recover, and double down on being myself, honoring myself, bringing out the truth of who I am. And I am not Cass. I am Marie. And Cass helped me see that.

Dammit, Cass, I fucking hate you for doing this. This is really confusing and hurtful. I wish I could talk to you about it. I wish I knew how serious you were about really doing it. I would have told you how much you meant to me. I would never have tried to stop you, but I wish I would have told you how much I love you, how much you improved my life, and how many people you helped just by being your beautiful flawed self. Fuck you, and I love you.