Day 12ish: Struggles and Revelations

I have been awol for a time. I have been trying to stay vegan, but right now it's been a real struggle. I don't entirely get why, because I have always felt better being a vegan. But I still struggle sometimes, and it has been made obvious by my increasing weight. I saw a 2-- number for a brief flash, and that really freaked me out. I have been below 200 for several weeks now, and even though the number went back down after performing necessary functions, it really bothered me.

I have been reading Peter Singer's Animal Liberation, partially because I love philosophy, psychology, and most of the things he is discussing, but it is a heavy book. It has at least 600 pages of continuous cruelty to animals, whether through experimentation or factory farming. He is honest in his observations because I have seen some of the experiments via Earthlings and a lot of Psychology classes. Some of the things just make you cringe, even though protection of animals has significantly improved since the 1970s and 80s, it's still not 100 percent. The majority of animal experimentation is on rats/mice, rodents, and rabbits as far as what I experienced directly, but the animals still are experimented on with no guarantee of outcome. They still perform shocks on animals as far as I know. So anyway, it is some heavy reading and I haven't gotten to the factory farming yet. I'll let you know how it goes.

Anyhoo, all that to shock-start my veganism again. Because I have a number of food and medication allergies, it's almost 100 percent necessary for me to be vegan. Because I'm allergic to a whole class of antibiotics, as well as dairy and soy, it's almost impossible for me to eat meat, eggs, and dairy without having some kind of reaction. This should be motivation enough to stay away from it. But sometimes it isn't! I am so used to eating meat, dairy, and eggs, and having people give me shit about being vegan (I get my protein from beans, nuts, lentils, greens, and a number of things, thanks for asking), sometimes I still fail at it. This totally sucks!

I know a lot of this has been due to laziness on my part, and also due to nasty approval addiction. This is a long complicated story, but ya'll already know most of it so I won't expand on it to the point of being annoying. Suffice it to say, I want to make everyone happy but can't, and it sucks! I know I need to do what makes me happy, but I don't really know what that is anymore. But I will make the effort to find out. :-)

Have a great evening all, be blessed and enjoy the journey.