Rumspringa
After 15 years, I’ve decided that I am going to try not being a vegan for a while. I have though very long and hard about this and feel like this is the right decision for me (for now). A decision that has scared me oddly (even writing this post scares me), but I think that fear reinforces for me my feeling that I’ve become too attached to veganism as an identity and that I should back off for a while and figure out my relationship to it and reexamine my original intentions. A sort of vegan Rumspringa as it were.
A bit of history. I’d grown up eating meat (in Montana, Iowa, and Germany – all very meat heavy places). Even vegetarianism wasn’t much on my radar. At one point the girlfriend of my step-brother’s dad was a vegetarian and would eat tofu burgers, which my brother and I found completely baffling and would make fun of in a “can you believe what she is eating” sort of a way. Neither of us could really wrap our heads around it. The very concept was funny because it seemed so outlandish.
When I was in high school, I was pretty active in a variety of environmental causes and groups and I started to be around more vegetarians and even a few vegans, which also was a new concept. But at least I started to get it. Eating lower on the trophic pyramid means less land used to feed us means less deforestation. I could wrap my head around it and even began to contemplate it. Then one summer, some friends of the family (who were my age and vegan) from Germany came and stayed with my mom, Susan and I. So while they were with us, we made sure that the food we made was vegan and they did a fair amount of cooking as well. After the month they spent with us, I realized I had pretty much been vegan the whole time and it didn’t feel that difficult and I felt good.
Over the next couple of years, I really dove in. Reading as much as I could, experimenting with different diets and foods. And I was pretty dogmatic about things for the first several years. I was fully in it to win it and I’m sure was probably quite annoying about it at times. But I really connected with it and brought a lot of awareness and attention to what I was doing.
Now, 15 years later, I’m feeling a bit like I’m vegan by default. I don’t pay a ton of attention to my diet these days, which especially as I’ve become increasingly active is not a good thing. I know that I’m not getting enough of certain things in my diet and also don’t really have the motivation to really step up and do the nutritional research and experimentation to develop a good vegan diet for my athletic performance needs. Just to be clear, I’m fully aware that you can be very active on a vegan diet. There are vegan iron man competitors who are much, much more active than I, but it requires a level of attention that I have not had the motivation for lately.
Another thing that has been on my mind as I’ve been considering this is the idea of attachment and identity. I’ve been doing a lot of reading and studying of the yoga sutras lately. The yoga sutras say that the cause of suffering is “the association or identification of the seer with the seen”. Being vegan is one of the biggest identities that I have taken on over the years as who I am. Of course, it’s not who I am, but I’ve associated with it to a degree that I feel is a little too unquestioning at this point in time. It can make us a little bit too dogmatic when we claim an identity. And eventually it means that we have a set of rules that guide our behavior that don’t need to think about anymore. We don’t look for circumstances where those guidelines may not be the best thing for us. We can just sort of cruise by on autopilot and that’s what I feel like I’m doing right now with my veganism.
None of this means that I won’t be back to a vegan lifestyle in a couple of months, a year, or however long it lasts, but I think I need a reexamination. I’m going to have to go pretty slowly introducing dairy into the diet so my stomach doesn’t hate me. So we shall see how this experiment goes. I could hate it and come running back quickly, I could stay away forever. I’m really trying to be as receptive and attentive as possible and examine with an open heart and open mind. Here goes.
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January 3rd, 2009 at 11:19 am
[...] wrote an interesting post recently about releasing a chunk of his identity. In discussing it last night with he and a friend, we got onto the topic of [...]
January 3rd, 2009 at 6:39 pm
You could consider the idea of ‘doing no harm’ with regard to eating:
by going/returning to vegetarianism through sustainable, organic foodstuffs that do no harm to creatures: dairy from cows/goats/sheep that have been ethically grown and cared for, eggs that are free range (although I believe Ariel once wrote about you hating them so forget eggs), local products-a locavore-only sourced within one hundred miles of your location. Luckily for me in the Hudson Valley, as I’m sure it is for you in Seattle and surroundings, I can get local milk, cheese, even flours, grown and milled right here, lowering my carbon footprint as it were, while supporting local farms and being more conscious about what foods I’m offering my family.
Best of luck to you in your personal and career decisions. I’ve been lurking for awhile but haven’t commented. My belated condolences on the loss of your step-mom Sally. My father died in Sept after a long battle with Alzheimers. There aren’t words, really, that can express the emotions of losing parents. If I knew good ones, they’d be yours.
January 3rd, 2009 at 9:22 pm
good for you! i, however, am going the other directions. after about 10 years of vegetarianism, i’m now putting more energy into going more vegan. it’s been getting harder for me to reconcile NOT being a vegan while being such a staunch vegetarian. i’m not sure how much of this is related to identity – it’s true that for many of the vegans i know, that is one of the primary things people know about them – maybe part of it is that i want to identify as a vegan (vegetarian is fairly non-issue around here, but vegan still is), but it just feels like a natural move forward for me. good luck – i’m interested in seeing how it goes.
January 4th, 2009 at 12:53 am
Thanks for the thoughts Ms. George. Sorry to hear about your father. That’s not easy. And Amy, good for you too! I will say that there is so much about veganism that I connect with and that has brought me a lot in terms of my own relationship to food, the environment, my own values. It’s been fantastic and it’s not something I would have done for so long if I didn’t think it had a lot to offer. The one piece of unsolicited advice I will give is to do your nutritional research and especially for the first bit, track what you are eating to make sure you are getting enough nutrients. I would even suggest after 6 months or so getting a blood test and visiting a nutritionist who specializes in such things. I can’t tell you how many people I’ve known who have tried going vegan without real thought and knowledge behind it and just ended up malnourished and unhealthy. When you do it right though, it can be great. So good luck to you too. If you ever need any insight, let me know. I have a fair amount of stored knowledge built up over the years.
January 4th, 2009 at 6:07 pm
pls to come partake in cheese w/ me when you are ready. maybe after yoga class sometime. you know, b/c after doing something so good for one’s body, i figured we could ruin it by putting something else that’s not so good into it. heh.
January 18th, 2009 at 8:43 am
what about ahimsa? this seems directly contradictory to yoga. all of my teachers are hardcore vegans. what about the harm you are causing animals and the suffering you are inflicting on others. is your tt mainly exercise based yoga or is there dharma element to it?
January 18th, 2009 at 9:25 am
Kiana,
Ahimsa was definitely something I thought about, and in the end I decided that I needed to walk a middle path for a while. I don’t think that eating dairy is inherently harmful to animals, and maybe the challenge here is to try and be really conscious about where you are getting your food from.
As for your other question, my teacher training is heavily philosophy oriented also. If you read above, you will see that some of my reasoning for wanting to unattach to the identity comes directly from the yoga sutras.