I’m transvegan.

In fact, I met my first (real live) vegan yesterday. She’s the new office coordinator at my school, and she’s been vegan for 4 years. After blushing and trying to contain myself from asking a million questions and wanting to pour out my heart about all the reasons I’m transitioning and the progress I’ve made, I felt a little embarrassed that I still struggled with showing self control at work. I don’t punish myself or shame myself for not having 100% vegan days. Instead, weirdly enough, I have this deep underlying absolute confidence that I WILL be vegan by the end of this year. It’s just a matter of building small habits, since the mindset shift and the conviction are already there.

For example, nowadays eating meat is just a non-option. It’s like serving you plastic. You’d never eat it, no matter how delicious everyone around you said it was, or how normal everyone made eating plastic seem. It’s plastic! Gross. For me, being a vegetarian is that obvious. Meat is just NOT a food choice to me and, therefore, choosing a vegetarian diet is very easy. I realized that that only happened after I had a serious mindset shift, when I noticed that I really don’t believe in eating meat at all, and I need to put my money where my mouth is (or... put my mouth where my values are?) and stop being such a hypocrite. I call myself an environmentalist? I love animals? I hate factory farming? I think abusing animals for man’s tastebuds is criminal? So I can’t eat meat. Done, simple. And, honestly, it was simple (in hindsight, at least). It was a transition, it took me 6 months to slowly eat less and less meat, and for a 3 months period over the summer I rarely ate meat at all. Then, in the beginning of September, I ordered a salmon roll. I ate it, and then I felt immense guilt. Like I had cheated on myself. That was the last time I ate meat.

Going vegan is a very similar process to me. I’m already convinced. The dairy and egg production industries are awful and they inflict as much harm on chickens and cows as the meat production industries, they just don’t get slaughtered in the end (except they do... layer chickens become broth when they’re too old to keep laying eggs, and the calves that the pregnant cows produced milk for are slaughtered for their meat). Additionally, factory farmed milk (and therefore cheese) is just a bunch of fat and often times mucus and, well, I could go on and on but that’s not the point. The point is, I’m convinced I need to go vegan, I believe in it firmly. 

But... I’m not there yet. I’ve had a hard time having 100% vegan days. In order, from easiest to hardest, are the transition moments that put me to the test:

1. Grocery shopping. For me, this is easy. I feel no desire whatsoever to buy milk or cheese and I’ve learned that cooking is fun! I’ve LOVED exploring with new flavors and ingredients. I’m learning how to use foods I had never even heard of before and expanding my taste buds infinitely, not to mention learning about the health properties of tons more foods.

2. Picking the vegan option on the menu. Living in NY, it’s actually not that uncommon to have vegan (or can-be-altered-to-be-vegan) options (well, an option) on a restaurant menu. And, when given the choice, I’ll most likely pick the vegan option... but not always. This is especially difficult with pizza or pasta. Today I actually went to a Mexican take-out place and got my tempeh bowl without cheese or sour cream (*self high five*).

3. Snacking at work. OH MY GOD WHY IS THIS SUCH A CHALLENGE?! It’s not even that I’m hungry and I don’t even enjoy the snacks half the time. But it’s so easy and satisfying to go down to the teacher workroom during a prep and GRAB SOME CHEDDAR SOUR CREAM CHIPS or a chocolate chip cookie or a microwaveable mac and cheese (urh, gross). And as awful as it sounds, sometimes it’s just something to do. Eating because I have a free minute in the day and the food is available and free and fuck it, I’ll just grab these chips. NO TATI STOP!

One solution I found to help keep me honest was to bring my own snacks to work, since that’s my biggest daily source of problems with my self control. I’m going to want to snack on chips, cookies and junk? Fine. But it’ll be MY homemade vegan junk. So I’ve been baking cookies and bringing in my toast (and earth butter and cashew “ricotta” and all the things) in numerous Tupperware containers to work. It’s worked, except that it requires a ton of advance planning and honestly space in my backpack. I prefer eating my own snacks over the processed foods junk at work, but if I didn’t have time to make anything then what happens?

So today I tried something new. I’ve been seeing this ring designed by a vegan Etsy seller that says “vegan” on it. I thought if I had that ring and saw it on my finger, I wouldn’t “cheat” on myself. I didn’t buy the ring, but I did write a small V on my finger, and on the inside of my wrist. Lo and behold, it actually worked. I would see the V and remember what my priorities were and realize that I’m not hungry and I didn’t snack. All. Day.

I agree that we can fundamentally disagree on difficult issues, and I agree that you can believe in something and not have all the answers to the questions.

However, I personally enjoy being able to discuss these different, complicated and multilayered issues. I want to learn about someone else’s opinion (yours, in particular), and I want to have my own challenged. If I hold a certain belief but you find a bunch of flaws in my argument, by all means, point them out! I think it’s okay to say “I believe in this, but I also don’t have the answer to those questions. I see that there are holes in my argument.” In my opinion, these conversations help open my eyes to the fact that, if I’m going to support a certain cause (whether openly advocating for it or not), I need to be informed. And if my argument can’t hold itself together, I need to be made aware. Being a curious, educated and reasonable human being I know that I’d go on to do research, learn more about it so I can have a stronger argument and a better formulated opinion. Or at the very least acknowledge that I fundamentally believe in something but don’t have enough information to make a solid argument in favor of it (although that makes me wonder: then how can you believe in it?) Where I stand on a certain issue, on a hypothetical and/or fundamental level (e.g.: “everyone has the right to seek protection for themselves and their families”), I recognize may take many shapes and forms in practicality, and not all will be beneficial to society at large. That’s another thing I enjoy about these conversations: elevating them out of the realm of hypotheticals, and actually discussing what they would look like politically. In day-to-day life, for people like you and me.

I didn’t mean to attack you or make you feel cornered. I did mean to question your thoughts and I wanted to hear you defend them. If I was convinced by your argument I would’ve said “you’re right, I need to rethink that.” That’s what a healthy debate is, and I love having them with people whose opinions I respect and whose thought processes are different from my own. Like you. I find these conversations enriching, and I’d like us to have more of them.

He walks over, leaning my chair back so I’m staring directly into his face. My hands immediately pet his beard with its thick, twisty hairs. Prickly, but soft. A long kiss. My chair is upright again, but this time I lean my head back so it’s against his belly, which is surprisingly hard, bloated. I lift his shirt and hide my face under it. His hands on either side of my face, feeling the shape of my nose, my lips.

I got out of the couch and moved to the studio nook so I could say: It’s from my Studio Nook that I’m writing this.

Crafting. DIY-ing. Starting a small business. Teaching. Danny. And now, writing. Rather, writing should have been the first on this list, but I took a break from it. I want to get back. I feel the urge to write, and after reading A Little Life, I feel the urge to document my happy years, my life with a partner I love, my endeavors. Throughout all the interests I’ve had the one constant is writing but I haven’t written in months. I hope I can bring it back. I hope I can enjoy what I write.

I also used to day dream about the life I wanted and things that made me dream and feel wistful. I haven’t in a while. But I still live moments and think of how they’d make a beautiful movie scene... but I’ve never been drawn to movies like I have been to books, to writing.