An Important Thing

For a long time – years – I’ve tried to avoid talking about the dreaded v-word (vegan, not vagina) on my blog because I didn’t want to deal with arguing or rolling my eyes at anti-vegan “jokes” about desert islands or antagonistic questions from people who don’t actually care about the answers but just want to bait me.

Very recently I had a revelation that I’d like to share with you:

Fuck that shit.

I’m not going to pussyfoot around an important component of my spiritual life just to pacify trolls. I’ve avoided subjects like my veganism or fat-positive posts because a long time ago I got death threats and extremely cruel emails and I shrank back into my cave to hiss at passersby and never actually express the totality of myself to the world.

Again: Fuck that shit.

I’m watching people all over the world stand up and be seen and killed for what’s right. Obviously the BLM movement is not meant as a self-help tool for White people, but having taken up the work of examining my behavior and educating myself, in the midst of learning a lot of hard truths I also realized I don’t want to play small anymore, whether about fatness, veganism, mental health, magic, social issues, or religion.

Now, please note, I am not going to be posting inflammatory things or vegan-themed rants full of horrifying images of tortured animals. In fact my intention isn’t to “convert” anyone, but just to share this part of my life as it fits into my spirituality and other aspects of who I am. There will be food and probably some meditations and prayers, but I intend neither to guilt nor rage, only to be me. I will put together a post of links for those who want to know more. There are so many people out there who have already created great resources both for the whys and hows of vegan living and I’d rather send traffic to their good work.

In that same vein I am not interested in debating the subject. I don’t want to hear “mmmm, bacon” “humor” on my feed. I don’t want to hear why you can’t be vegan because cheese or how you tried it once and ALMOST DIED OMG or whatever. I don’t care about the asshole vegans you’ve met. Honestly I don’t care about your why-nots and I do not respond to antagonism. I don’t approve/I delete comments that aggravate me because this is not a democracy. I am not obligated to teach you or engage with you.

You are more than welcome to skip any post you want. It’s your time and energy! You decide where it goes! Just like it’s my time and energy that goes into writing here, and my time and energy that will not be spent engaging with trolls.

This is not to say I expect any of my regular readers to behave badly. You’re all great, and I’m so glad you’ve stuck with me. But whenever I bring up the v-word or talk about fat positivity I get a ton of static, and it’s that potential static I’m talking about.

What I hope you gain from these sorts of posts isn’t why you should behave a certain way so much as it’s how your ethics and beliefs mesh with your practices and how you behave in the world, whether as a spiritual person or merely as a consumer. I want more people to consider how their spiritual practices and beliefs do – and SHOULD – affect every part of their lives, not just the hour in front of the altar, on the mat, or in the pew.

I won’t be dedicating a huge number of posts to this topic, and it won’t be all in a row, just now and then when I feel the need to talk about it, or in posts where I think it has some bearing on the post’s subject. I’ve already been trying to do some of this since I restarted my blog back in March.

Now that I’m over 40 I’m coming to understand what “authenticity” really means and how we simply don’t have time in our brief human lives to trot out incomplete versions of ourselves for the approval of strangers. Therefore I’m hoping to be a less hesitant in posting things that are important to me just because they might bother a few people. I don’t want to lock parts of me away like they’re a dirty secret. So I won’t.

Fuck that shit.