Sheep and llamas grazing peacefully on a patch of grass — picture by @shfflr

A twelve-year story on the pursuit of veganism

At the age of 17, I decided to try going vegetarian. I lasted for one week. The tiny amount of self-esteem I had to begin with, got shattered into bits very quickly. Back then, being vegetarian meant you must have liked eating iceberg salad with slices of cucumber and tomato. It seemed as if nobody had ever made a fucking salad in their entire lives. And apparently, my choice to become kinder to animals deserved a huge shitstorm of negative comments and laughter. “LOL! Who the fuck wants to eat like a rabbit anyway”?

After seeing Gary Yourovsky’s talk on veganism a few years later, I decided it was time to give it another go. I was a bit older and wiser now and the people around me seemed to be a bit more mature. But back then, it was still near impossible to find any sort of vegan option on the go. The only choice you had was preparing all your own meals. Every. Single. Day. On a busy day, that meant packing some carrots, cucumbers and tomatoes into my lunchbox before leaving in a hurry. Not surprisingly, that meant I was often left in malnutrition throughout the day — resulting in a version of myself who was hangry AF way too often. Let’s be honest… in our kind of society, who has the energy and time to prepare every single meal? Some, maybe, but I sure as hell wasn’t part of them. After 1,5 years of being full-on vegan, I couldn’t cope anymore. I went back to eating moderate amounts of cheese and eggs.

For the next ten years, I would go through cycles of eating meat, being vegetarian and being vegan. See, I have struggled with depression most of my life. Whenever I was in a good place, I had the strength to keep going. But when I was having a bad period, I was incapable of moderating my emotions. They would swing massively. One moment I cared deeply for the welfare of animals while other moments I completely lacked the mental capacity to care. I was in a vicious circle of beating myself up over any moment of weakness. How could I be so cruel to animals?

Implications for mental health

This is why I believe that trying to live up to the perfect ideal of veganism can do more harm than good. I immensely admire those who have been vegan for decades on end without failure, but for some of us, it just doesn’t seem to be so evident to consistently stick to the same exact set of rules. It can — in some cases — even become a weapon to our own mental health.

I used to use social media to portray myself as vegan, while in reality, I was consuming small amounts of animal products from time to time. And every time I did, I simultaneously felt a sense of shame and an urge to make sure nobody would catch me in the act. It was a textbook example of double standards.

Failing to live up to my own ideals damaged not only myself but also my social relationships. I would so strongly believe that animal cruelty was evil. Meat-eaters were shitty people and at the times I was vegan, I felt morally righteousness. Yes, the thought that vegans were better people had occurred to more than once. Any conversation on veganism left no room for the opinion of the other person. Veganism was the right thing to do and there was no way around it. Usually, we ended up more divided than before.