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.