My experience of life is lots of little moments of waking up. There are many times I have hunkered down, locked in, put on the blinkers, with a mindset of 'no, I don't want to change, this is how it is, this is where it feels safe and familiar'. And those times are valid and necessary. But they are not exciting or life changing, they do not make my eyes light up and my heart beat with emotion.
To feel that, to feel alive I have to be prepared to open my eyes a little wider no matter the consequences, to abandon the feeling of safety and to step outside of what I think I know.
Sometimes these moments of life are magical and astonishing in a way of awe and wonder and sometimes they have made me sick to my stomach, angry and all sorts of other emotions that can be hard to feel. But I'd never go back. I have not died from feeling these emotions, I have only enriched and deepened my understanding of what it is to be human, to be compassionate for all living creatures.
When I saw I had been lied to my whole life I was so angry and devastated, I felt enormous sadness and shame for the pain, anguish and destruction I had unwittingly caused. I had been blindsided by the establishment. I could say that I didn't know, but I did, on some level, but I chose to stay asleep. That was until 2 years ago when I could no longer deny that I was responsible for the killing and torture of many beings, babies being taken from their mothers, to be killed or to live life in slavery, to be kept in unbearable conditions with no means of escape, That most of the plastic in the ocean comes from commercial fishing, that the destruction of the amazon is largely due to soya production to feed cattle, that our rivers and oceans (yes in the UK) are polluted due to cattle farming, that animals feel emotion the same as we do...
There were days when the truth rendered me unable to move from my bed the anguish almost unbearable until I realised that I am not powerless as the system prefers me to believe, that actually I make a real difference each and every day by the choices I make. This realisation that I am a powerful being spilled over into other areas of my life, I began to make other changes, to make more of a difference in the world. The only regret I have is that I didn't become vegan sooner. And it didn't happen overnight. I made small changes that built into something bigger, I made mistakes, there were days I cheated and surprisingly only the odd day that I missed cheese and they are long gone.
