Ana Harris on “Does Mold Avoidance Fuel Fear?”
Ana Harris wrote a blog post called “Does Mold Avoidance Fuel Fear?”
From the article:
When I started mold avoidance I had MCAS and was having severe allergic reactions to a huge variety of foods, chemicals, molds and natural substances. I was reacting to everything and wasn’t very skilled at identifying the toxins that were actually driving my illness. This meant that I did some pretty extreme things to stay alive, like sleeping in a rental car in the middle of nowhere and bouncing around from location to location for six months.
Even if my life hadn’t been in danger, this “extreme” mold avoidance was more than worth it. Getting away from tiny amounts of toxicity allowed me to remember what it felt like to be a healthy human. In the desert, I felt normal again. My throat stopped swelling up and my body stopped breaking out in hives. My depression lifted and my panic attacks stopped. I had energy to hike. My brain came back online and I could read books again.
This is what mold avoiders call “getting clear.” Getting clear can involve a fantastic amount of effort and certainly looks kind of crazy to an outside observer. But it’s important to remember that the point of getting clear is not to live in a tent forever or to avoid every last mold spore. The point is to give your body a break so that it can finally remember what life on this planet is supposed to feel like.
After you get clear, you know what it’s like to feel well and can more easily identify and avoid the toxins that are actually harming you. It’s like doing an elimination diet and then slowly reintroducing foods to see which ones cause a reaction.
It’s not about looking around constantly as though everything is a potential threat. It’s about knowing your body enough and trusting your intuition enough that you can avoid the toxins that are actually driving your illness. When you do that for a while, you might be surprised how many of your other reactivities were secondary. I no longer need to avoid the cleaning aisle. I no longer need to avoid any category of food either.
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