1KHO 893: I Was Never Behind | Cassidy Gard, Cosmic Goodness

**Ginny Yurich** (0:00)
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Welcome to the 1000 Hours Outside Podcast. My name is Ginny Yurich. I'm the founder of 1000HoursOutside. And I have just read a phenomenally good memoir, a page-turner, a heart-jerker. It is called Cosmic Goodness, Surrendering the Shadows to Live in the Light. And this author, this woman, sure has surrendered the shadows to live in the light. Cassidy Gard, welcome to you.

**Cassidy Gard** (1:25)
Hi, Ginny. You know I'm a huge fan for so long. This is such an honor. Thank you for having me.

**Ginny Yurich** (1:32)
The honor is all mine. You have an incredible story, an incredible story of resilience, an incredible story that shows that you can make such big changes in your life. Even after the hardest of hard childhoods, you kicked off your adult life all on your own. You know, like in secret, you're taking these extra classes, you're earning money, and then you're like, Mom, in two weeks, I'm graduating early, I'm moving to New York. Like what a story. You have this beautiful family. And then currently, as we speak right now, you're living in France, working on another book. So we're going to be talking about that as well. But I'm just such, I'm so thrilled. I'm so thrilled to get a chance to talk with you. I know it's like we met two minutes ago, but we're going to kick this off talking about your childhood. You had a forward by Mariel Hemingway in the forward. I was a child who never learned to play, grew up with a family rattled by alcoholism. Then you're talking about your own dad and how he was so unbelievably hard.
So hard.
You're like, oh, it's sickening when you think about it. It's so sad. So we'll talk about a couple of the little parts of it, and people can pick up the book to read more. But your dad has addiction. He's an alcoholic. You write, with my dad's addiction, childhood slipped through my fingers. Never mind to hold, never mind to savor. He had three children, three different moms. One of the things that you talked about was when you did get to visit him, you would get to spend 10 minutes with him every hour.
Can you talk about that and how that affected you?

**Cassidy Gard** (3:13)
Well, it was interesting because at my mom's house, there was no television. I just had a stack of little house in the prairie books, and my mom really encouraged reading. At my dad's, it was what I was placed in front of as a form of babysitting because he didn't want to partake. Also, dial-up internet had just come out. Suddenly, my dad, he lives in the middle of nowhere, he's isolated, he was constantly getting fired from teaching jobs, and he truly just got addicted to going online. I don't have any idea what he was doing during all those times, but I was in front of the TV, he was on his computer, and it was such a weird 180 from being at my mom's house.
Even though my mom's house was really uncomfortable in a lot of ways, and we were really poor, so there wasn't a lot to do. I did have hundreds of books, and that is really what enriched my world and my life. But at age like five, six, seven, when I'm at my dad's, I'm just in front of the TV all weekend. That's why I have such an aversion to it now with my own children. I never want them to spend that amount of time in front of a screen the way that I did. Yeah.