No Safe Place

In November 2005, the day after my thirty-fifth birthday, I moved into a new apartment. It was on the first floor of a white stucco building with a red tile roof, a few blocks north of the University of California, Berkeley, campus. Excitedly, I set about decorating it. I piled pink-and-chocolate-brown-striped towels in the bathroom, installed wire shelves in the kitchen, and hung a full-length mirror with a thick, faux mahogany frame in my bedroom.

“I’m so lucky,” I thought one afternoon as I examined a shoe rack at Hold Everything. “It’s great to go shopping for furniture without worrying about chemicals.”

For most of the second half of my twenties, environmental illness, or EI—also called multiple chemical sensitivity, or MCS—had debilitated me; chemicals in substances like perfume, car exhaust, and cigarette smoke made me so sick that I often couldn’t leave the house for months. But since 2000, when I’d moved to California for graduate school, I’d been healthy: I could fly on airplanes, stay in hotels, and even wear dry-cleaned clothes. By 2005, EI seldom entered my consciousness; in the months after my move, I was focused on the teaching assistantship I’d just started and on taking walks through the hills of my new neighborhood.

In mid-March of 2006, I relapsed. I woke exhausted one morning, despite a full night’s sleep. Sitting at the computer, I felt drugged, too confused to cope with the handful of messages in my inbox. “It’ll pass,” I told myself. “I’ve been working too hard.”

For most of the next two months, I was bedridden: so weak I could hardly sit up to pour myself a drink of water, so dizzy I could barely manage a trip to the bathroom, so brain-fogged I couldn’t read, and so nauseated I had to fight to get small meals down. Insomnia and anxiety often kept me up all night. And in the days following my relapse, I began reacting severely to the same chemicals that had made me ill in my twenties. The bluebooks in which my students wrote their final exams made my head throb; the smell of laundry detergent wafting over from the building next door was intense and nauseating. The symptoms of EI vary; for me, headaches, nausea, exhaustion, and anxiety ensue following exposures to seemingly innocuous substances: fragrances in perfume and laundry products; fumes from new paint or carpets; the lingering scent of cigarette smoke on someone’s clothes; car exhaust; new clothes or furniture; and—worst of all for an academic—books, newsprint, and even a blank piece of paper. I composed most of this essay by writing on sheets of paper that I held at arm’s length. Even with this precaution, the paper and ink (which contain bleaches, dyes, and other chemicals) invariably brought on headaches, fatigue, and confusion. Each time, I lasted about an hour.

One day a week, I managed to get myself to campus to teach my section. The effort was enormous, but as far as I could tell, no one had any idea I was ill. EI presents an existential dilemma for those who suffer from it: as awful as we sometimes feel, we usually look fine. “Do you think that’s an appropriate use of disabled parking?” a stranger had barked at me years ago, just after I’d begun using a handicapped placard. And I’d read numerous news articles in which “experts” claimed that people with my illness were just looking for attention. This is one of the most painful social aspects of EI: it’s bad enough to be sick, but to be sick and not be believed can be heartbreaking. “All your tests are normal. You’re very healthy,” more doctors than I can count have said.

Scientific understandings of EI are murky. Evidence suggests that our bodies’ ability to detoxify chemicals is impaired, and some researchers have found neurological abnormalities in EI patients. Yet people who report sensitivity to chemicals are frequently suspected of malingering, or of imagining their...