Moving is STRESSFUL. And Why I Left Los Angeles.

For a few years now, I knew Los Angeles was frying my nervous system, and I mean it literally, because I’d hear sirens twenty times a day, and I know that sounds like an exaggeration, but I started counting, so I promise it’s not. Getting from Santa Monica to Beverly Hills, which is basically the west side to the other side of the west side for anyone who doesn’t know LA, could take forty five minutes, and I watched a city I love get harder and harder to live in, more crime, more theft, more visible decline everywhere you looked. I have opinions about the leadership behind that, but this isn’t the piece for it, and you probably already have your own read on it anyway.

But here’s the thing, I love LA, I mean that, and that’s exactly why I didn’t leave sooner than I did, because the opportunity and the energy and the beauty of that city are real, it’s just that the city has been falling apart at the same time it’s been offering all of that, and both things were true at once for years, and my body kept clocking it even when my mind still wanted to stay.

So we moved, about an hour up the coast to Ventura County, somewhere slower, somewhere greener, somewhere I barely knew and had never really lived anywhere near, and the day we came to tour it, something settled in me that I hadn’t felt in years, and it felt like home before it had any right to yet!!

There’s a second reason we moved that mattered even more than the traffic or the sirens, and it’s that we were living in a mold infested building.

I’m going to write a full article (and create a very comprehensive guide) on this soon, the whole story of what happened and how I ended up recovering faster than most people do because of the tools and education I already had going into it, but for now, here’s the short version.

We lived in a condominium, which meant water damage from the units above us was completely out of our control, and within the span of two weeks we had four separate leaks, one in the guest bathroom, one where our kitchen sink overflowed onto the floor while I was, of all things, in the middle of interviewing someone about mold toxicity, and two more from the ceiling on top of that. Mold can start growing within about 24 to 48 hours of water sitting somewhere it shouldn’t, according to EPA guidance, and we never saw a trace of visible mold anywhere in that unit, because it was behind the walls and under the floors, which is exactly why so many people get sick and never connect it to their home or their office. You don’t see it, so you don’t suspect it, and the whole time it’s just sitting there, inside the structure of the building.

This wasn’t even our first experience with it, because we’d already been through a remediation a few years earlier, black mold near our HVAC system, so when the leaks started stacking up again and the HOA did not care one bit, I was done. We’re hoping to start trying to conceive soon, and there was no version of that I was doing in a building that still had an unresolved mold risk sitting behind the walls.

And if a landlord or an HOA ever tells you mold isn’t a big deal, or that they’ll just scrape it off and paint over it, I need you to hear me when I say that is not a fix, because painting over mold does not remove mold, it just makes the problem invisible instead of gone, which protects their budget and not your health. I know remediation is expensive and disruptive, but this isn’t a cosmetic issue, it’s a health issue, and for some people, a serious one.

Here’s what I did not expect. I write about stress physiology for a living, I know what cortisol does to the body, I know what a dysregulated nervous system looks like on paper, and none of that prepared me for how hard the process of moving itself turned out to be.