Veganism Saved My Soul
When I stopped eating meat and dairy, I became the first vegan I’d ever met.
Like most people, I grew up eating those common foods without giving it much thought. I completely dissociated the food from the animal. In my mind, a cow had nothing to do with my drive-through burger, a pig had nothing to do with my Granny’s famous BLT sandwiches and a chicken had nothing to do with scrambled eggs.
But somewhere inside of my animal-loving heart there was a rumbling, a nudge from an unnamed source. At 23, in the summer of 1994, I loaded up my little red Toyota in my hometown of Denver and headed on a winding road trip that led to my great Aunt Nadine’s house in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, before landing at my Granny’s place in Lafayette, Indiana. My mom’s side of the family had been southern farmers, and I got it into my head that if I couldn’t kill a chicken once I arrived at Aunt Nadine’s, I shouldn’t allow myself to eat chicken. Several hot and dusty days drive and one tattoo later, I arrived to find a house where the only chickens around were already in the freezer. Relieved, I dropped the thought, continued my carnivorous ways and headed north to my Granny’s where I landed a job in a local factory to pay for the rod I’d just thrown in the Toyota.
I didn’t know that everything I believed to be true about the world was about to be slammed with a comet.
He was brilliant, kind of cruel and gorgeous. He was used to girls falling in love with him. He wasn’t used to falling in love back. We met in November and married in December. We spent our honeymoon on the floor of my Granny’s small house, and we were crazy happy.
A few months later, we loaded up my little red Toyota once again and headed back to my home state of Colorado where, once safe, he told me the truth about his childhood. The kind of abuse I thought was relegated to ancient Greek fiction had been his everyday experience. Thoughtless (and ubiquitous) Oedipus jokes made by friends and society were relentless reminders of his early-life reality. I did not know such things happened in the real world. I felt like the earth had dropped from beneath my feet. I was falling and I didn’t know where, or if, I would land. The only thing I knew was: suddenly, I could not eat meat.
“It happens a lot when there’s been a trauma,” the therapist told me.
But I wasn’t a survivor of trauma. I just loved a man who was. She explained that I was experiencing an intense secondary-trauma; the empathy I felt toward my husband’s experience made it almost feel like the experience had been my own. I was enraged in a way I’d never been before in my life. I wanted the person who’d done this to him in prison—or worse. I wanted revenge.
Yet in the midst of all that rage, I felt a deep tenderness toward all living beings at a level so deep I didn’t know it existed within me. The thought of such an innocent creature (a young child) being violated by someone meant to protect him—somehow my subconscious mind knew instinctively that’s what my ‘kill a chicken at Aunt Nadine’s self-agreement had been about. Why would I pay someone else to do to an innocent creature—and animal seen as food—things I would never do myself? My husband’s trauma was not food-related, but the foods I was eating were the direct results of a traumatic life and death. Trauma was trauma. Today, we might call it ‘intersectionality,’ but that word was not in my vocabulary back then. I just knew that I simply could not contribute to the cycle of abuse and consumption of meat and its by-products.
My dietary shift took its toll on our fragile marriage. My hair turned greasy from so many oily stir-fries. I felt incredibly isolated from friends and family. I also had no idea what to eat. I tried to keep eating chicken for a while, but the veins reminded me this had once been a living animal. For a year, I struggled—and so did our marriage. Just when I was about to give up on vegetarianism out of sheer frustration, my mom surprised me with a subscription to Vegetarian Times (VT) magazine. Products! Recipes! Resources! VT was the lifeline I needed to sustain my vegetarianism. If only there had been something as simple as a magazine to help sustain our marriage. It fell apart despite our love being intact. He moved away and went on to live a successful—and I hope happy—life.
As for me, I remained committed. To vegetarianism, that is. About a year in, I read “Diet For A New America” by John Robbins (heir to the famous Baskin-Robbins ice-cream fortune) and went vegan—which I thought I’d be forever. Quite unfortunately, I began including cheese, dairy and eggs back into my diet after nearly eight years of veganism, and remained stuck in the vegetative state of vegetarianism for over a decade. As an ‘ethical’ vegan (as opposed to ‘health’ or ‘environmental’ vegan), a healthy diet was not a priority for me. Coke and French fries was vegan. Smoking cigarettes was technically vegan. B12 was a supplement for suckers. Such was my outlook.
It’s amazing I survived for 8 years with that attitude and steady diet of junk food and cigarettes. No wonder I thought I needed other nutrients. It just took me a while to realize I wasn’t getting them from dairy, either.
It wasn’t until my father died in 2016 that, once again, a deep tenderness broke open inside of me and I remembered who I was: an ethical vegan (who was ready to be a healthy vegan). The advent of the Internet (and the graphic videos of what really goes on in slaughterhouses) and the discovery of VegNews (a 100% vegan publication) supported my heart and mindset.
As this goes to publish, I am 48 years old. I know now that ‘vegan’ is who I am; it’s not just how I eat. I stopped eating meat when I was 24, so this is the ‘half-and-half’ year. Next year, I’ll be able to say that I’ve been veg for over half my life. And what a great life it is. By not taking anyone else’s life for my food, my life has only grown, and my spirit shines brighter than ever.
