Thinking about ‘going vegan’

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As a vegan I try to pass on information. I know what I want to say but don’t necessarily understand how to say it nor take the heat off me for saying it. I’m always looking for keys to communication so that I won’t seem preachy or self-righteous. Yes, I want to be stirring questions and making others feel a little troubled, hopefully in order to get them to think on their own. I want to be a bit edgy … but too, to get the balance just right.
I have noticed when I speak ‘vegan’ to omnivores that it can fire their ‘contemplation zone’. They’ll be maybe reacting, maybe computing how it would be if they did change, contemplating how it would feel if they did. (Assuming I don’t put them off at the outset)
Contemplating going vegan ranges from revulsion through to interest and sometimes onto inspiration. For me, at first, it was somewhere in the middle, where I was able to quieten my racing-ahead dread of change for long enough to hear encouraging signals from my ‘heart’ - picking up advice to try out ‘that particular change’.
In the process of change, I knew I had to feel confident enough not to land myself in serious trouble. That ranged from the mild inconvenience of missing certain things right through to fear of losing my health, my ‘normality’ and my friends. I was certainly weighing ‘me-first’.
There was a person at the time who was suggesting I ‘go vegan’ and I noticed disturbing signs in me. I’d have listened with interest on any other subject but this one. She was touching the most raw, most sensitive buttons. The ‘me-first’ in me was defending my pleasure and comfort zones. I was thinking, “Don’t touch my food, anything but that”. But she wasn’t interfering for idle reasons. She was suggesting that the most ‘me’-centred activities, like eating delicious but harmful animal foods, needed to be changed. Her concern was for me, that my very potential as a human was currently being wasted like rotting fruit fallen from a tree. I began to realise that I was a victim of a self-perpetuating, harmful habit.
Simply by way of ingesting foods extracted forcibly from the bodies of sentient beings, I was self-harming. I’d already given up meat but now, giving up these ‘secretions’, was upsetting to think about ... until I came to see that changing ‘me-first’ doesn’t have to make ‘me-last’, more like ‘me-second’. I started to see the need to step back from the current paradigm related to the ‘dominator species’ attitude, until I could see the weaknesses - a whole string of needs, wants, addictions, insecurities, vulnerabilities and peer pressures.
‘Me-second’, I realised, was a sign of growing-up. Not selfless, in fact something very selfish because it was enlightening – that this one habit change, if I could make it stick would make me a herbivore. And from there I’d get the balance right, allowing me to be edgy, take a few risks with people and give me a chance of meeting people head-on, without giving them the chance to see through me.
Being herbivore starts with undoing, that is boycotting – eating no more animal stuff, in order to no longer encourage their incarceration. This was to become a sufficiently strong statement to suddenly give me something profound to work for. And for all vegans alike, to save our own souls and let what we say be taken seriously.
I’ve never expected people to pay attention to what I have to tell them. They are free-willed enough to take it or leave it, but at least it shifts the emphasis off the personal. They aren’t trying to find the hypocrite in me. And that allows me to shift the emphasis from ‘me’ to ‘the other’, to talk about the sort of world I dream of. To project a world that will be nice for our kids and nice for freed animals who are no longer imprisoned.