I grew up as a free-range kid in a small town in Central NJ, gleefully chasing after hot air balloons that floated above the neighborhood streets on feet stained purple from my beloved mulberry tree in my backyard. In the evenings, my mom would make me stay still long enough to pull ticks off me, and then release me back outside to catch fireflies under moon. Then the summer before middle school, we moved North to the Pocono Mountains where my mom left behind the corporate grind to run a meditation retreat center. Seventy acres of untamed forest and meadow became my new stomping grounds. With no neighborhood kids nearby (or neighborhood for that matter), I made friends with the land—following the beavers’ steady industry along the stream, reading Tolkien stories to the trees, and walking for hours along the rambling stone wall picking Queen Anne’s Lace until I’d hear the distant ring of the cowbell, calling me back for dinner.

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While I grew up slow, the allure of the fast-paced, glossy life called to me in my twenties. After college, I landed my dream job at a public relations agency, managing national media campaigns. I left that world when I was ready to have children, eventually breaking out on my own to open fitness studios and launch stand-up paddleboarding in Annapolis, Maryland. I was burning the candle at both ends, running a business and raising children. But I fell into the belief that I was achieving a healthy life by eating right and staying fit. Then, as I neared mid-life, my body erupted in debilitating rashes from head to toe—itching, stinging, swelling—for two relentless years. My body was on fire from the inside out.