Professional Globetrotter

Casey describes her earliest memory as a crystal-clear vision of the blue-and-white striped municipal water tower in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.  From birth, by virtue of her father’s career, she was exposed to a countless number of cultures and subcultures, some exotic and some very familiar.  She has been a worldly eight-year-old navigating the streets of Hiroshima, a cosmopolitan twelve-year-old tagging along with the children of Congressmen in Washington, D.C., a black-clad misfit in the John Cougar Mellencamp picturesqueness of McAlester, Oklahoma, and a blue-haired, lei-bedecked graduate in Honolulu, Hawaii.  That’s the short list.  After leaving the nest (which, by all rights, must be counted as an airport), Casey continued her itinerancy during her years with The Mimsies, revisiting all fifty states at least once, and exploring Canada from Alberta to Nova Scotia.  She’s never quite as comfortable as she is when throwing a few essentials in a bag and heading in the direction of the sun.

Professional Rebounder

As comfortable with change as she is now, all the uprooting was difficult for Casey, especially as she was a shy, introverted child beset by recurring infections and various maladies.  During those early years in Saudi Arabia, Casey displayed prodigious abilities in reading, writing, drawing, painting, singing and dancing.  She also displayed a voracious appetite for input.  Both these attributes would serve her well in her role as the perennial new arrival.  She found her artistic talent to be a conversation starter, and her natural curiosity to be the magic carpet that would carry her away from where she often did not want to be.  Repeatedly ripped away from her comfort zone, she learned to find comfort in exploration, books, records, model airplanes, and Voice of America radio.  Though she did not realize it at the time, Casey was developing what are perhaps her most valuable talents; the ability to adapt, to make the best of any situation, and to appreciate that which is challenging.

Professional Patient

During the family’s tour of duty in Japan, Casey commuted, by taxi and speedboat, to an international school in Hiroshima.  It was on these daily voyages over the Seto Inland Sea that she first began to develop her singing voice, standing out in the mist on the stern, disguising her notes in the drone of the engines.  It was also one on of these journeys that she experienced her first migraine, complete with blinding, scintillating scotoma and vomiting.  That event catalyzed a pattern that persists, in varying degrees, to the present.  At various points in her life, Casey has been relegated to total convalescence due to the ubiquitous migraines and all that attend them.  After being ignored and abused by much of the medical community from whom she sought help, Casey, together with her mother, took up the burden of research.  Self-education led to a host of dietary changes and the blessing of several knowledgeable, caring physicians, who finally diagnosed a handful of Casey’s conditions and were able to offer some help.  It has taken over thirty years for Casey to be able to understand her situation well enough to manage it.  That management is a daily practice, and requires strict adherence, but it has taught her the beauty of discipline and self-control.  All her health-related adversity has also instilled in Casey a fervent desire to do what she can to help other people in the situation she finds so familiar.  It has taught her that when all seems hopeless, there is hope, and it comes from within.

Professional Student

In addition to all the other challenges life has thrown her way, Casey is learning disabled.  For someone with an unquenchable thirst for learning, this presents a significant problem.  While testing off the charts in verbal ability, she has always had a severe problem with numbers.  It was not until 2007, when she attempted to belatedly begin college to formalize her lifelong love of historical study, that she was diagnosed as having Dyscalculia.  Until she was thirty-three, Casey hid the fact that she had to labor to read a watch, dial a phone and complete other ostensibly basic tasks that involved numerals.  It was only at that age she first heard the term, although she long considered herself to have “Dyslexia, with numbers”.  The tacit and powerful effect this long-unnamed condition has had on her life is profound.  It was the point of origin for the development of significant shame around issues of money and time, which she is only now beginning to conquer.  She mentions it here in the hope she may be able to help someone else who is suffering in silence.  Unlike Dyslexics, people who have Dyscalculia often fall through the cracks of the educational system until adulthood.  Children who struggle with math lessons to the point of tears and anxiety may be merely told to “try harder”. There appear to be few resources for those afflicted, and  the anxiety and shame surrounding their struggles can be monumental.  It doesn’t have to be that way.  For more information about Dyscalculia, please visit www.dyscalculia.org.  While Dyscalculla has kept Casey from earning her degree, it has not kept her from earning her education; her life’s work is to learn all she can about as much as she can, and God willing, use her knowledge to be able to help whom she can.

Professional Muse

Every life is fraught with challenges; in this regard, Casey Castille’s life is not remarkable.  What makes a life remarkable is how the person employed by that life responds to the challenges it presents.  It wasn’t always the case, but Casey considers herself a zealous optimist.  She believes we are all gifted, talented and able to benefit from our adversities as we learn to overcome them; to use them as footholds to rise to the next challenge, and ultimately scale the mountain of life.