How I Became a Vegan Activist

"Activism, not veganism, is the moral baseline"

Experiences, especially difficult ones, can burn morality principles into us. When I was 21, while traveling in India, I got a hard food poisoning and nonstop vomiting, until I fainted. That terrible feeling, in every part of my body, made me think of the chickens in factory farms.

I knew that humans had genetically distorted them so severely that by the end of their lives, it is hard for them to walk or even move. In those hard moments of illness, when the emotional weight was so negative that I could think of nothing except how terrible it it for me now, I understood something about myself: right now, I am not a human being who can write stories. I am an animal fighting for my life.

At those moments I asked myself what is the difference between me and them. I am just another animal, like those chickens fighting to reach the food and water after their bodies have collapsed or in the process of collapsing. This may have been the first time I really simulated those chickens, and my sickness was naturally "doing all the work" for me. Since then, in increasing capacity, I have been active for animals.

Me at 21, during a yearlong trip in India and neighboring countries.