Alyssa
Blackson

I grew up healthy. I was a three-sport athlete, an overachiever, a perfectionist. Volleyball was my main sport. I was a pastor's kid who did everything right and felt good doing it.

Then I came to college and within three months I had deep cystic acne, my hair was falling out, I was exhausted, and I just did not feel like myself. I thought it was the life change. I went to a dermatologist and they told me my options were Accutane, five rounds of antibiotics, or spironolactone. Seven out of ten chance it would work. Might come back. I sat there and sobbed.

I eventually found out it was mold. In the room I was paying to live in. The school fought me on it for six months. They cleaned it with bleach, which does not actually fix mold. It makes it worse.

I decided to go the natural route. I did an elimination diet of only meat and cooked vegetables for four months. I tried so hard to do it perfectly that I ended up with a bacterial infection in my stomach from the stress alone. That summer was its own whole thing.

Through all of it I learned more about health than I ever expected to. And I kept running into the same wall. Most of what I found was written for women dealing with menopause, not someone my age. The information existed but it was scattered and hard to filter through, and nobody was putting it together in a way that actually helped.