This is rather long and rambling. I apologize in advance. I have a lot to say, I guess, and nowhere else to really say it, and it's all a bit of a jumble. The last few days have been very troubling for me, in terms of what I have decided is necessary, and I haven't quite sorted out how I think it should all go together but I feel like if I don't say all this to someone, I'm going to go mad.

So here it goes.

I have always loved animals. This did not prevent me from eating them, a double-think issue I used to find ironic in my mother, who absolutely LOVES both living cows and hamburgers, without ever actually applying the same standards to myself. My father was in the military and although my family was in most ways very loving, that we moved around a lot was very hard on me. I had a very hard time making friends as a child--I was too different, and so sensitive I made a spectacularly easy target for bullies. So my fondest memories of playing with other creatures growing up involved our pets. It was my cat who cuddled me when my best friend moved away. It was the dogs who rushed up to greet me when I came home from school and played in the yard with me. I absolutely loved animals, all animals.

My adored father's nickname for me growing up--and to this day, in fact--is Chicken. It is, I admit, a very odd term of endearment that merits a bit of explanation: his favorite picture of me, the one he carried with him on all his deployments, was of me as a very little girl at a state fair, holding a baby chicken against my cheek. Its fluffy yellow down and my golden hair were just the same color, and this inspired him to call me his baby chick, which eventually modified to him calling me his Chicken. To this day, when I call him, he happily exclaims "it's my Chicken!" And when I would come home upset as a little girl, he would pull out my beloved animal encyclopedia and show me pictures of beautiful chickens strutting around in a field and tell me that they were proud, clever birds who carried themselves highly, straight and proud, and I should be too, because I was his Chicken, no matter what anybody said. When school bullies would call me a chicken (I was timid) I would think to myself "What's wrong with chickens?" Many of their taunts bothered me, but never that.

My favorite movie as a child, unsurprisingly, was Charlotte's Web.

Thinking about it, it baffles me how I managed to get this old (I am, as I write this, twenty nine) and not have all this really hit me earlier.

This is actually my second stab at giving up animal products. When I was in the early stages of thyroid failure (I have Hashimoto's Hypothyroidism...which means my immune system decided that destroying my thyroid gland was a great idea), my dawning troubles manifested largely as stomach issues, and with my doctor's full support and blessing I went on a rather long food journey that ended in me eating no animal products (at least on a regular basis...dairy and fish occasionally found their ways onto my plate, but only rarely) and being gluten free. This was a tremendous pain. All you vegans with celiac disease have my sympathy and respect.

I would not call my prior state one of veganism, however. It was not ethically driven, which is why as soon as we figured out that my stomach troubles were actually a manifestation of my hypothyoridism (pesky master glands...when they fail, everything starts to go haywire) and I got on a sufficient dosage of thyroid replacement to resolve my symptoms, I started to eat everything I had before (with the exception that I had since become Jewish and had thus started more or less to keep kosher).

It was not that I wasn't sympathetic to ethical vegetarians and vegans. I was not one myself, at the time, but there were many arguments for veganism I thought were very compelling when I considered them in the abstract (which is the only way I let myself consider them). My childhood love of animals and nature had blossomed into true environmentalism by high school, and I was very aware that a plant-based diet was much more sustainable resource wise, and that there were a great many environmental issues that were a direct result of animal farming. I just considered giving up all animal products extreme. Clearly, I thought, the ideal solution was to improve agricultural practices, something I thought to be a very good idea...when I thought about it. Which wasn't often, except in a roundabout "Gee I'm sure that fish kill in the Delaware has something to do with nitrogen problems with the run-off from all those chicken farms" way.

In the interest of honesty, I also admit that I didn't think that hard about the issue on purpose, because I could admit to myself that if I did, I would have to deal with what I learned. And I didn't want to deal with that. It would make my life complicated, and my life was already quite complicated. Still is, sadly--who's isn't?

I got back into vegetarianism because of my thyroid--ironic, because it was both what made me pursue it the first time and, when treated, was why I stopped. After my thyroid problems, I gained a good thirty pounds...which eventually I decided needed to come off again, and a while back I set about the long work of undoing what I'd managed to do to myself in the last year and a half. This got me interested in food issues again--I re-read Fast Food Nation and the Omnivore's Dilemma, and sat down to watch Food Inc, which angered me enough that I turned to my husband and informed him that I flatly refused to consume anything that came out of a factory farm. It seemed to me that some essential spark of humanity was lost in the whole process--that nothing about any of it was humane, from the way the animals were treated to how the workers were treated to how the farmers were treated by the big processors to how the public was being force-fed a manifestly unhealthy and potentially lethal product with pathetic safety measures in place. And all I could think about, as I prepared dinner and stared at what I was cooking, was that by consuming meat I was buying into that system. I was supporting it. There was no way of getting around the fact that I was supporting it, not if I kept eating meat. Every time I ate, as many, many authors I'd been reading lately pointed out, I was voting with my fork, and I couldn't justify voting for that system anymore. I couldn't handle the thought that, yes, meat is very yummy, but the animal that was killed to provide it to me wasn't just killed (a thought I could handle) but functionally tortured its entire too short life, forced to consume unnatural products (who feeds grain to grazers and meat by-products to herbivores??! I mean, really? Who the *&^^ decided that was a good idea?!?!?) and then in all likelihood was slaughtered needlessly cruelly in a filthy environment...and that isn't worth very yummy.

My first thought was "Oh, I'll just stop eating meat. Dairy and eggs aren't as bad." Except, of course, I already knew they were. So I thought "I'll buy organic dairy and organic and free range eggs." Except I had already learned that short of figuring out where a local organic farmer who would let me wander around his farm and see how things were done for myself, I had no real way of being sure what a company claimed for their products was true...and finding those things is hard even when you live in a big agricultural area, and I don't, I live in the New York metro area of New Jersey. So I went "#$%^", and, then "*&^%!!!" and then realized that if I was going to do what I'd already announced I was going to do--that is, give up on things that were factory farmed--I was going to have to give up eggs and dairy too. It would all have to go.

The funny thing is, when you start thinking like that, it starts to really occur to you exactly what it is you've been doing for so many years. You--or rather I--don't start out thinking "Animals are thinking, feeling creatures and maybe I shouldn't eat them." You've already thought that a hundred times before and pushed the thought aside as fast as it occurred to you. Oh no, you start out thinking "Who the *&^^ do these people are, thinking they can feed me this crap?!" then you go "I refuse to eat this crap!" and then you go "Holy cow, this crap was a cow. Like, a cow. We're doing this to cows. To animals."

And then you watch the trailer for Earthlings, because you got it in your head you wanted to see if it really was that bad and you'd heard that documentary showed some pretty accurate and brutal things, and your husband wonders why you locked yourself crying int he bathroom for an hour. You locked yourself in the bathroom for an hour because you weren't entirely sure you weren't going to be very, very sick.

And no, I couldn't make it past the trailer and I'm not sure I ever will. I don't know how anybody with a soul can even watch the trailer and not positively writhe inside for what it is we do, and how unnecessary it is, because we don't need to do it to live.

So that's why I'm here. I'm trying to figure out how to do this thing as I go...and although I ate a nearly animal-product free diet before, it's harder now, because why I want to do it is so much more intense, and it feels to me like that really raises the stakes.

So I'm here. And I'm kind of scared. But I'm determined that I will not participate in this broken, horrible system any longer, and if that means being here, confused, and kind of scared, well, I've been through worse.

So hi. :)