A Return to Veganism (Take Two)

So I sat down to write a post that rapidly was becoming an autobiography of eating. A few paragraphs in I was starting to bore the hell out of myself. The whole epic was really meant as a contextualized introduction to the announcement, that in April I returned to veganism.

The long and short of it is that I go in and out of phases of thinking about what I eat. After managing to stay vegan in college, in Australia, and on a 10 week road trip around these grand ‘ol omnivorous United States, I went back to just being just vegetarian shortly after we moved to Tucson. The truth is I got kinda lazy. I ate cheese, I watched TV, I drove a car to work, I wasted time. And perhaps I needed these years of fallow time to just rest up and eventually bore myself back into thinking about the choices I make.

A few months ago I read this article in the UU World. It more or less reminded me of all my reasons for going vegetarian when I was 12 and vegan when I was 19. I decided it was time for me to take a bit of a challenge back into my everyday life, and change how I eat.

This past week I have of course also been quitting smoking. It has been interesting (to say the least) to watch my desires for old comforts to emerge. Those of you who know me know that I bite my nails. I started biting my bails when I was six years old and my parents wanted me to stop sucking my thumb. So clearly I have a long history of replacing one comfort habit with another.

I’ve been kinda silent on this blog the last couple months. One excuse is of course being a puppy mom. Beyond that I think I’ve been in some sort of passively introspective cloud that had me worried about blogging. What is my own voice, I wondered. Why am I still so stuck in my own head when there are real things happening in the world? And why would I want to share my own revelations about mediocrity and depression on the web?

And eventually I realized that the real issue is that there are still huge conversations I’m not ready to have with myself. And that is the fear that has been keeping me dormant.

Towards the end of college I decided I wanted to be a minister when I grew up. By the summer after college I had made a short list of perspective seminaries (the same list I am still working with today). Yet I knew I wasn’t ready to pursue seminary yet, I didn’t feel together enough to embark on such an intense journey.

It might be time.

It might be time for me to care about what I eat and how it impacts my body and this world. It might be time for me to care about how I spend my time, how present I can be in relationships, at work, in joy and sorrow. It might be time for me to stop waiting for the perfect time and just forge ahead – raising my voice, even as I am learning to use it.