Heat stress

My good idea (becoming vegan) is like a beautifully engineered car with its engine cold, needing a kick start. My veganism, my ideals, seem half clear and half fuzzy. I wonder if I’ve laid too much hope on making these changes. Here I am, trying to change into a non-violent person (‘Go Vegan’ the slogan says). But I need more than fearlessness. I need a confidence that will uphold my ideals and ignore what others think about me. I’m inspired by the good idea but that doesn’t mean I understand everything about it, like what the implications of it will be. Perhaps it’s a bit like when we fall in love and then have to learn how to live together. We grasp the idea well enough but how do we get our brain around it, to put it into practice?
When we ‘go vegan’ - we like to talk about it. Boast about it too. And because we do, we have to make it work. Perhaps we squeeze it a little too hard and it takes on too much importance, all at once. We go in full-bore, because we don’t want our good idea turning sour on us. That would mean going back to square one, and we’d never live that down. And besides, this idea deserves our best shot, so that we’ll understand it better … all the better to reach others with it … all the better to get them to join up and be company for us. Overall, we want this change to work. But all this wanting leads to trouble … we stress about it. And that is characteristic of people starting out being vegan.
But the pressures remain, only they change. For longer term vegans, the food isn’t the problem, people’s opinions of us aren’t so problematic but the stress doesn’t go away, about the slowness of people to come round, to even discuss the subject. The world sleeps on and time is running out. So, for all vegans, young or old, when the scales fall from our eyes and we see what others are not yet seeing, then it’s stressful to see the extent to which the conventional world is reliant on animals and psychologically how fixed people’s attitudes are about animal use. So vegans have to learn to live with a certain level of stress, (the heat is in the kitchen and somehow we have to find a way to stay in the kitchen, heat or no heat).