Hair loss, hair appointment mishaps, and learning how to best care for my hair over the years brought me here. The journey, what changed, what I swapped, and what I didn’t is what we’ll talk about in today’s episode. 

+ More

Synthetic Braiding Hair Test Results - consumerreports.org

17 Dangerous Ingredients to Avoid in Hair Care - consumernotice.org

We don't need a crisis to change our minds. After 9 years plant-based, I'm adding seafood and eggs back in. Not because something was wrong, but because it was time.

Paint, primer, filler, outdoor stain… turns out there's always another layer to low-tox living, even after a decade of doing this. I'm walking through what I've recently learned, plus why this doesn't mean tearing out what you already have. Same realization I had with furniture and mattresses: invest in the low-tox version when it's time to replace.

+ More to Explore

What should I know about formaldehyde and indoor air quality? - EPA.Gov

Wood Stain Fumes: Why They’re Harmful & Safer Alternatives - Ecospaints.net

Occupational Medicine in the Paint Industry - Pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

Burnout keeps coming up: online, in conversations with friends and family, in my own home. Between work, community, family, and everything going on in the world, it seems a lot of us are running on empty. In this episode I'm talking about why bed rotting isn't actually giving us the rest we’d think, and sharing free, practical alternatives that help us genuinely decompress. It’s not to judge, but the goal is real rest. The kind that lets us come back to our lives, and our decisions, from a full place.

11 years into low-tox living, there are still a handful of things I won't shortcut: the sheets we sleep in, what's under our sink, what we burn, what touches our food. This episode is the honest breakdown of what stays non-negotiable in our home and why, category by category. Not a perfection standard, just what it actually takes to get a home that feels clean and cozy without the trade-offs: no candle headaches, no skin irritation, no wondering what's in what we eat.

So I sat down to record a story-time episode about the moment I decided to stop wanting the easier option… I couldn't find it. This is what that told me about how consistency actually works, and why a slow erosion of the old want is more real than any single decision.

Low-tox living means constant trial and error, and what works for me won't work for everyone. But one thing has stayed constant for 11 years, and it's become a rule I don't break. This episode shares that simple thing that is a testament I don't deviate from.

Persistent acne found me years ago and stuck around enough to impact my confidence, while I tried almost everything marketed to fix it… most of which didn’t. I don't really break out anymore, but I still can't point to the one thing that changed it. What I can point to is a handful of things that shifted around the same stretch of time: how I ate, how seriously I took hydration, how I actually dealt with stress instead of pushing through, gentler products across skincare, hair, and laundry, and one specific medical step I took under professional guidance.

None of these alone explains it, and I'm still not sure any single one is the actual reason. Together, it's the closest thing I've got to an answer.

I used to pride myself on doing it all: high output, every box checked, days that looked productive from the outside. That mindset got things done, but it also brought me to burnout and an irritability I didn't recognize until I was in it. Since then I've been learning that rest isn't one thing, it’s different kinds. A workday pause is different from a weekend with no home projects tacked on, which is different from a trip where I'm not secretly still reachable. The version I resisted longest is the one I think I needed most: time with no agenda and no named benefit. I'm batching this episode so the podcast keeps going out while I take a new version of a break for me, with room built in to land back into normal life after returning.

Recorded mid-packing, in the middle of a very full week… this happens to be a travel week, but the rule is the same for busy ones: what stays non-negotiable when time gets tight, and what I let flex instead.