How it all began

I’m not sure where or when my journey to who I am now really began. A lot of my current thinking are beliefs I’ve had as long as I can remember. My dad was an environmentalist and I can remember him telling me “That’s not gross, that’s cool!” at some point when we were looking at a display of huge spiders at the zoo. I don’t remember how old I was, but I’ve never been afraid of spiders. He used to take my sisters and I on long walks to the creek near our house and tell us about the beavers and how the dams work. I remember him yelling at some boys who were throwing rocks at the beavers and fooling around near their dam. My dad can be extremely scary when he’s mad, I don’t think those boys ever messed with those beavers again. My parents also took us camping, and my sister and I went on many hikes and climbed up mountains with him.

So I grew up with a love of nature and the outdoors. When I was 18 I moved away from home with my best friend. She was a neat freak, and would use Lysol, Mr Clean, etc a few times a week to clean our kitchen, our bathroom, our windows… I got lots of headaches, and I knew they were probably connected to all those cleaners. I’d also discovered through my biology degree that germs and bacteria really aren’t as scary as those companies like to tell you they are, and that even the so-called “bad” bacteria could be useful to us.

I couldn’t convince my friend to stop using them, but I bought a book (Clean House Clean Planet) on how to make my own natural cleaners, and from the day I moved out I’ve been using those instead. I was amazed at how well they worked, some of them even work better than any commercial cleaner I’ve ever used. I think that success really helped me see that my ideas I had growing up about chemicals and toxins really aren’t as crazy as I thought they might be, and led me to be willing to question many other practices that were acknowledged as “safe,” like vaccination and the foods we eat.

Related posts:

1. There’s something in the air
2. Sickies