Sometimes I feel like I need a PhD just to buy shampoo. Between toxins, EMFs, and climate guilt, it’s hard to know where self-care ends and panic begins. This one’s about trying to live clean without losing my mind.
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Transcript
I am struggling with something I imagine a lot of people struggle with, but I haven’t really heard anyone talking about it. So here’s what I’m struggling with. How neurotic is the right amount of neurotic to be about toxicity and climate change?
I mean, we know that rising toxicity through our phones and through environmental chemicals is here to stay, and we also know that climate change is real and impacting our planet. We also know that we can make choices around these things, and we’re educated about it. But there’s such a push and pull between being non toxic, protecting ourselves, being socially responsible, and then just living our lives.
I live in New York City, everything is poison. You walk outside, it’s polluted. It’s poison. There’s noise, there are EMFs flying through the air. And so when I start to think about my personal choices, I wonder, are these really making a difference, given the amount of toxicity we live with on a day-to-day basis? How granular do I need to be, and how granular is it even possible to be?
Orthorexia is a thing where you learn all of this wellness information about what’s toxic, and you start to try to eliminate all of these things, and all of a sudden it completely consumes you. All I see on my feed is: alcohol is poison, plastics in leggings are poisoning us, our mattresses are poisoning us, if you don’t eat organic and you eat out, that’s poisoning you. Our skincare products are disrupting our hormones, not to mention things like plastic water bottles, and the fact that I still, I admit it, charge my phone next to my bed. Maybe that’s what I need to stop doing.
The wellness girlies make me feel irresponsible if I use anything that has anything in it. I was following this account, and she was talking about all the things at Whole Foods that you think are healthy but are poisoning you, and all the things at Sephora that are poisoning you that market themselves as clean. But if you follow her plan, there’s almost nothing left to use, and you have to be so informed all the time.
Now, if that’s your jam, that’s cool. But for me, I kind of waver. I get really into it, and then I throw my hands up in the air and say, I can’t. I can’t manage all of this.
Because here’s the reality. For example, my kids play football, and I know they play football on artificial turf, which I know is ground up tires, releasing tire dust into their lungs and embedding in their scrapes. So do I not let my kids play football? I know that the EMFs and all the radiation in our air are going to be like smoking, something we’ll look back on and think, of course this was unhealthy. So, do I turn my Wi-Fi off in my house at night? Not very practical.
Do I make my daughters wear merino wool leggings to work out in and throw out all of their Lululemon, not to mention all of mine? Do I ban my kids from eating junk food? It’s just not possible for me to control what my kids buy and eat outside the home. They’re teenagers, and two of them are now adults. Do I go back to being an ingredient household and have my kids complain because there are no unhealthy snacks in the house?
These are all things I’ve contemplated and pushed aside because it’s just not practical. So I do choose some battles. I do try to get my daughters to understand that all the stuff they’re putting on their faces, and all those perfumes, have so many toxins in them.
And even for myself, I struggle with how clean my skincare routine needs to be for me to feel good about it. Because also, by the way, I’m vain, and some of those products that are not so clean work really well on my face and get rid of my wrinkles. So I really struggle with how neurotic to be or how not neurotic to be, where to place myself on the scale of clean to not clean.
I even think about when I talk about products. I have this guilty feeling when I talk about products that aren’t perfectly clean, knowing that some people are going to look at me and say, well, that product’s not clean, in a very judgy way. I don’t want to be that person, but I also don’t want to load my kids up with poisons and toxins, not to mention myself.
So the struggle is real. How many of these things do we adopt?
Here are a couple of things I do that I feel pretty good about. These are the battles I choose. I suppose we try to eat real food at home, actual food, whole foods. I do talk to my girls all the time about how toxic all that skincare, perfume, and makeup is, because there’s so much of it and they’re using so much of it, particularly the perfume.
I hate plastic water bottles. I’m offended by plastic water bottles, not only because of what they leach into the water that you’re drinking, but also for what they’re doing to the planet. Disposables, I can’t stand them. That being said, when I go to the airport and I’m flying, I buy myself a plastic water bottle. It’s sometimes unavoidable. I suppose I could bring my water bottle and refill it at the airport. Maybe I’ll try to do that.
I do buy organic mattresses because we sleep on those things all the time. And if we paint, I insist on non-VOC paint, because the smell of that paint is just a constant reminder of the chemicals being released into the air.
And I think that in terms of climate change and being socially responsible, I generally try to buy less stuff, clothes, and cosmetics. I put things in my Amazon cart and then look at them and think, “Do I absolutely need this, or can I get by without it?”
And of course, my favorite, I shop on The RealReal. It’s absolutely my favorite, not just because I like the idea of not buying new clothes, but also because I love the treasure hunt of it. It’s fun.
And when I talk about products, I feel pretty strongly that I don’t want any platform I create to be about buying more stuff. So those are my things. That’s about all I can handle. The rest, I waver. I go back and forth. Sometimes I’m good about it. Sometimes I just give up and think, gosh, we can’t control all of this stuff.
So let me know if you’ve had the struggle too.
