Toxicity

I didn’t know I was being poisoned.

It started with this feeling I couldn’t explain. Not sadness exactly. Not even fear at first. Just this constant, underlying sense that something was wrong in my body. Like my nervous system had been hijacked.

The anxiety was unreal. Not “I’m stressed.” Not “I have a lot going on.”

I mean I would come home and something would happen to me.

I’d walk into my apartment and it was like I entered a different frequency. I would pace. Back and forth. For no reason. Like my body didn’t know how to settle. Like I couldn’t land inside myself.

Hours would go by, days would go by, weeks would go by and I wouldn’t get much done at home. I felt like I was in a trance. But not a peaceful one—like I was trapped in my own body.

At the same time, my health was collapsing.

I had pneumonia.
I had already had COVID multiple times.
And this was all after long COVID.

So everything felt like COVID. All the time.

Fatigue. Brain fog. Chest tightness. That weird dissociation. The anxiety. My skin started changing too. It got textured. Inflamed. I was breaking out constantly. My vision was blurry and spotted, I had tremendous head aches. I was exhausted. And then the nerve pain started—pins and needles, sharp and electric, like my body was glitching.

Nothing felt connected, but everything was getting worse.

And then my kids got sick.

That’s when it stopped being confusing and started being clear.

My son—who was born a preemie, one pound twelve ounces—hadn’t needed his nebulizer in years but suddenly, he was constantly sick. Bronchial. Struggling to breathe again.

We moved into that apartment, and everything changed.

The hallway outside our unit was soft—squishy. You could feel the water damage under your feet. There had been a stain in the ceiling before I moved in. I asked them to fix it. They said they did. They painted over it.

There was a leak above my son’s bed. Not once. Not occasionally. Constantly water coming through the ceiling. Eventually a leak started over my bed. The three of us slept in the living room together.

I kept thinking: this isn’t safe.

I asked them to check for mold. They wouldn’t. By January I asked them if I could have the apartment tested myself and they told me to get a lawyer. At this point, I wasn’t allowed to speak to the leasing office anymore and was only able to communicate with their lawyer. All the mold mitigation businesses have policies that they will not come without landlord approval.

By the time they finally tested—three months in—it came back high.

In the middle of winter...Which means it was already really bad when I moved in.

They did a “cleaning.” They gave me one night in a hotel. That was the solution.

They didn’t fix the roof. They didn’t fix the source. Water kept coming in… you could see it in the walls. They kept painting. I knew it was still growing.

At one point, they opened the ceiling and left it open for months uncovered, sometimes with plastic, other times with plywood, most of the time completely open.

There were mushrooms growing inside it.

Mushrooms!!

This wasn’t anxiety.

This wasn’t me falling apart.

This was my environment making me sick.

And by then, my kids couldn’t stay.

I had sent them to stay with their grandma.

There’s nothing that prepares you for that decision. Knowing your home isn’t safe. Knowing your kids can’t stay with you.

I slept on her couch while trying to figure out how to get out.

And at the same time, I had to face something I didn’t want to admit.

I couldn’t maintain my schedule anymore.

My body wasn’t cooperating. My mind wasn’t stable enough to push through it the way I normally would. And everything in me wanted to hide that—to keep performing, to keep it together, to not let it show.

But I couldn’t.

I had to be honest with my employers.

I had to tell them that I wasn’t okay. That I needed stability—immediately. That I needed to move into something full-time, something consistent, because my life wasn’t in a place where I could keep navigating uncertainty.

And I hated that.

I hated how exposed it felt. How vulnerable it felt to say, “I can’t do this right now” and “I need support.”

It felt like failing. Like everything I had worked to build—my independence, my capability—was slipping in real time, and now I had to say it out loud.

There’s a specific kind of embarrassment that comes with that.

Not because you’ve done anything wrong—but because you’re being forced to reveal how close you are to instability.

And I was closer than I had ever been.

Because leaving wasn’t simple.

Breaking the lease: thousands.
New deposit: thousands.
First month’s rent: more.
Moving costs. Time off work.

It was close to $10,000 just to escape.

I tried to fight it. I went to court. I called lawyers. Contacted my renters insurance who told me there was nothing they could do because it was negligence on the property management side. I wasted my time going back and forth with referrals just to be told: you should just move.

As if that was easy. Nothing came from it.

No real help. No real accountability.

Just the slow realization that everything I had built: my stability, my home, my routine… it was all way more fragile than I thought.

And how quickly it can all turn.

That experience changed something in me.

Not just physically, though I’m still dealing with that, but structurally.

It showed me how thin the line is between “I’m okay” and “everything is falling apart.”

How systems don’t protect you the way you think they will.

How you can do everything right and still end up in a situation that destabilizes your entire life.

And maybe the strangest part of all of it—

was how much of it felt invisible.

From the outside, I probably just looked anxious. Overwhelmed. Maybe even dramatic.

But inside, my body was fighting something real.

Something environmental. Something systemic. Something I couldn’t think my way out of.

It wasn’t just illness.

It was a collapse of safety.

I’m still dealing with the effects of having my body attacked.

What stayed with me the most—beyond the illness, beyond the displacement—was how little support actually existed when it came down to it.

I reached out to the county.

I thought there would be some kind of enforcement, some kind of protocol, something that would step in when a home clearly wasn’t safe.

But there wasn’t.

Mold enforcement, at least where I was, wasn’t really something they could act on. It was largely left up to the landlord. The health department came to check the ceiling. They asked them to close it. They didn’t. And when your landlord is a corporation—with legal resources, with relationships, with people who are in that courtroom every single week—you start to understand how uneven that situation really is.

It’s not about conspiracy. It’s about who knows how to navigate those systems.

And who doesn’t.

There also isn’t real support for people in that in-between space—when you know your home is making you sick, but leaving requires thousands of dollars you don’t have readily available.

So you stay longer than you should.

And your body pays for it.

What I also didn’t expect was how isolating it would feel—until I started looking into it more.

My algorithm started showing me other people who had experienced mold exposure. And the range of impact was… unsettling.

Because it doesn’t just show up one way.

For me, it was anxiety, neurological symptoms, skin issues, respiratory issues—this constant sense that I wasn’t fully in control of my body.

For my son, it was respiratory. Immediate. Visible.

For my daughter, almost nothing you could pinpoint but she struggled to wake up in the mornings in a way that wasn’t normal for her.

Same environment. Completely different outcomes.

And then there are people whose cognitive and emotional functioning are impacted in much more extreme ways. When your brain is inflamed, when your nervous system is dysregulated, you’re not operating from a clear or stable place.

That’s not an excuse for harm—but it is a reality we don’t talk about enough.

Mold exposure is not just a “home issue.”
It’s a health issue… it’s a a neurological issue… it’s a stability issue.

And right now, there’s a gap—in awareness, in enforcement, in support.

I didn’t know any of this before it happened to me.

And I think a lot of people don’t until their reality starts to shift, and they don’t understand why.