Vegan Underbelly

today is roughly the one year anniversary that i decided to become vegan. but i'm not really celebrating. instead, i'm examining ALL the reasons that led me to make this decision. whenever food is involved, things get kind of blurry...logic and emotion become tangled in a totally confusing knot. oh, then throw spirituality into the mix and it really becomes a full blown mess.
in this mess, many truths exist without canceling each other out.

for example, not eating meat is linked to my practice of ahimsa-nonviolence. i firmly believe that eating the flesh of another being is a violent act, by consuming that animal i am ingesting the violence that was used to kill the animal, that energy becomes a part of me and my peace is disturbed. as soon as the word "energy" gets thrown into the conversation, i know i lose credibility among most western thinkers, but for me this is a tangible sensation. i remember the first couple weeks i was vegan-i felt like i was on a perpetual high, my body felt peaceful and pure. it felt like light was pouring in and polishing my insides.

a couple days ago i ate a meatball the size of my fist. for real. not the soy kind, the cow kind. and then there was another time three months ago that i absolutely had to eat chicken and i went to the store and got a leg of roasted chicken and inhaled it right there in the store. another time i was on cape cod and there was blue fish for dinner. i might have had three servings of that fish and felt the ocean salty and vast inside of me, felt the slipperiness and the flowing currents against scales and fins and tails.

so do i get the prestigious pretentious honor of calling myself Vegan? i guess it depends on how snotty you are about it. because here lies the conflict: ever since i can remember, food has either been restricted from me or i have restricted food from myself. so with that kind of history, can i really say that choosing to be Vegan came from purely spiritual/political roots? probably not, i did choose it because it made me feel better but i also chose it because YAY! this is a food restriction that i can really be successful at 99% of the time. i have made a rule for myself and i've been so good for following it and i'm such a good eater and i'm really good at this diet. again, this gets confusing because while it becomes part of my history of making and breaking diets, this is more than a diet because it is also a spiritual practice and a political decision.

so...sarcasm aside, i DO feel good about following a vegan diet, but it doesn't come without a touch of shame for playing into my game of restriction and self degradation.