12/09/2025
The Day My Body Said No: How Fibroids Awakened My Holistic Journey and Introduced Me to Eco-Conscious Living
In 2008, my body said no...no to the ovarian cysts I had forgotten about, and the critical needs I had learned to neglect since I was 15 years old. When I sat in the exam room and heard the words uterine fibroids, I was told that five of them were growing in my womb...three the size of baseballs, two smaller. It felt as if the diagnosis had arrived overnight, but deep down I knew these growths had been forming for 2 decades, nourished by everything I had accepted as “normal.” As a matter of fact, in 1999 I had an iridologist appointment and the Dr saw the fibroids in my right iris then. I started reading about holistic living immediately after that; however, I was not ready to receive nor dive in deep just yet.
My menstrual story began in seventh-grade gym class in 1987, when my friend Jackie Bishop, bless her memory, handed me a huge maxi pad and with really no instructions. No one ever explained what cramps, nutrition, or rest meant for a young girl’s body. The pain that followed through my teens, cramping, spasms, exhaustion, moodiness, was brushed aside as something every girl endures as normal. Decades later, I would learn that my experience wasn’t only hormonal; it was environmental, emotional, and generational.
That wake-up call in 2008 became the anchor of my holistic fibroid-healing journey. It pushed me to question everything and pay attention to what I put in and, on my body. I started focusing on my emotional hygiene and emotional fitness/self-care, 9 years later. I really had no idea that all those things were connected. I started to get in rhythm when I was introduced to whole foods nutrition and all natural, eco conscious personal care. Intentionally and steadily, I started creating and transitioning into a new eco conscious lifestyle for myself.
Early Years: Learning What I Didn’t Know
By the time I was a teenager, I had already been conditioned to treat my period as an inconvenience instead of a conversation with my body. Every month I reached for painkillers and junk food, never realizing that what went into my mouth and onto my skin was teaching my hormones how to behave.
In the 1990s, the word eco-friendly rarely appeared in beauty magazines or aisles. However, I went to school in the suburbs of Memphis with white kids who wore Birkenstocks and were self-proclaimed "vegan" before it became popular. Me and my friend Tam Young called and described them as, "So save the world". Though I wasn’t vegan, I always loved their fashion style and the reason behind their buying choices. I relaxed my hair, coated my skin with Dial soap and Bath &Body works, and washed my clothes with heavily perfumed detergents, the same way pretty much every woman in my immediate family had. We trusted what was on the shelf. I didn’t know that many of those everyday products contained toxic chemicals now linked to endocrine disruption or that my diet of sodas, sugar, lots of Jiffy Cornbread and fast food could quietly feed inflammation.
When I look back, I see that my environment mirrored my inner world: busy, chemically overstimulated, and disconnected from nature. I inherited more than genes; I inherited habits. My mother, Aunt Valeria, and grandmother all battled painful cycles, cysts, and fibroids. They coped the best they could with the information they had. It wasn’t until my own diagnosis that I realized how our choices, what we eat, breathe, think, and apply to our skin, become part of our womb and hormonal stories.
That awareness was my first lesson in eco-conscious living. Healing, I discovered, wasn’t only about medicine or movement; it was about the ecosystem of my life. The foods I chose, the products I used, and even the thoughts I repeated were either polluting or purifying my internal environment. Learning to live sustainably became both an act of self-preservation, self-respect and resistance.
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