My Story
I lost my body to pain, my mind to trauma, my home to mold, and almost my life — all to find my spirit.
When I was a kid, I didn’t like flowers.
Anything I was supposed be like, I shunned. How could I be me if the world already told me who I was?
I grew up in south central Texas in the 90s and early 2000s — not a kind place for a non-compliant person with ovaries. I had an insatiably curious mind and was labeled a “sponge” by my grade school teachers. I excelled in school, graduating Valedictorian of my class. I seemed to absorb all kinds of things quickly, but had difficulty letting go of what didn’t serve me. I found freedom in intellectual pursuits, which were pretty much about everything — psychology to astronomy to philosophy and armchair spirituality — but ultimately found a home in the expressiveness of art and ultimate motive in my passion for justice. I graduated with honors from college and abandoned my isolated reality in libraries and oil painting in white walled studios to figure out what existence in this world was actually about. I traveled the U.S. with a band, spray painted murals, exhibited my art internationally, and supported radical social and environmental justice projects and movements as Occupy Wall Street blossomed and tree-sit blockades thwarted pipeline construction projects.
By my mid-late 20s, on top of child onset depression, I began to experience extreme fatigue, severe anxiety, panic attacks, heart palpitations, the inability to take a deep breath or sleep well — and over the next few years, it only worsened.
When I turned 30, a subtle mysterious spasm erupted on half of my face. I experienced a body that ached every day, I had horrific nightmares every night, and I didn’t understand why. The trick of the matter was that I looked ok physically so I just “pushed through” all of my symptoms. Even my partner at the time couldn’t understand what was wrong. I thought it was all in my head, too.
Feeling like I needed a positive change, something I could control, I quit my office job and decided to focus on something that could bring back joy to my life. I began the clinical program at ArborVitae School of Traditional Herbalism originally thinking it would just be research for an herbal reproductive justice art project I was working on; little did I know that studying herbal medicine would wind up saving my life.
I became enraptured with both the science and the tradition of my studies. I learned what good health actually was, how plant and mushroom medicine was there to support me, and how I could work on healing myself so I could live the meaningful, fulfilling life I was always meant to. But, even with my learnings, I hit a wall. I wasn’t getting any better — I actually started to feel worse. Much, much worse. Without warning, all of the progress I made reversed and I hit a bottom I didn’t even know could exist. In the middle of my final clinic year in school, which was during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, I suffered two accidents with trauma to the head (one bike and one auto) and discovered my Brooklyn apartment was host to mold hidden behind the walls and under the floorboards. And I had lived there for 5 years.
At the age of 33, I began my recovery from cognitive dysfunction, autoimmunity, fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue, IBS, GERD, breathing difficulty, hypothyroidism, MCS, MCAS, heart palpitations, neurological spasms, memory loss, severe depression and anxiety — all related to severe mold illness, long held toxic heavy metal poisoning, chronic EBV, Lyme disease, CPTSD, and the effects of my car and bike accidents that made everything so much worse.
Through herbal medicine, nutritional therapeutics, a few natural antioxidant IVs, and supplemental traditional healing practices including energy work, breath work, acupuncture, and others, I am now more whole and well than I can ever remember being. This journey, along with my passion for social and environmental justice, led me to understand the intimate relationship between what it means to steward right relationship with the planet and the self — and the critical need that exists for both. My experience has called me to the path and art of herbal medicine, and it is now with such humility and honor that I support others on their own journeys to healing and wholeness. (By the way, I now think flowers are nothing short of divine creation itself.)
If there’s something I’ve experienced and learned that might be able to support your story, please reach out.
Healing doesn’t happen alone.
I am grateful to all of the plants, fungi, and humans who helped me on my path.
My mother, Margie
Richard Mandelbaum RH
Kevin Troiano
Michelle L Bowles, C-IAYT, TIYT, LMT, e-RYT 500, NKT
Claudia Keel
Patrick Frattelone MD, RH, FIM, FACC
Hadaza Gonzalez L.Ac + Nourish Healing Collective San Antonio
Dina Falconi
Anthony William, Medical Medium
Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.
Audre Lorde