Do Your Best, Then Do Better.
Bijou Po (a pseudonym)
Everyone struggles. Most of us wake up to injustice bit by bit. Change is incremental. There definitely is a place for just going vegan and never looking back or never making a mistake in life for people who can — I take my 100% hemp hat off to them.
Some of us though, struggle with all sorts of dark life tunnels and byways. We want to be compassionate, kind, we want to step and stand forever in the Pure Way and be Vegan Super Rabbits… but, our reality of just being struggley-beings just doing our best gets in the way.
Many of us, find that life’s travails leave us tired and emotional and struggling. We do our best, but the baggage carried from work, parenting, looking after elderly parents, struggling with depression or the scars and slings and arrows of unfortunate childhoods mean that realistically our very best intentions are met only sometimes. I seek to make that ‘sometimes’ the majority of time, and succeed.
That is good.
I know that feeling of ‘failure’, all my best intentions gone to the pack when, despite weeks, month or even years of being 100% vegan, I find myself saying “Oh fuck it!” and eating peanut butter chocolate (with some milk in it) or throwing caramel sauce (made from condensed milk) on my soy vegan ice-cream. Or a situational moment, like being faced with the approbation of family at a fraught Christmas dinner and deciding to eat Mum’s trifle (a family tradition) because she made it and if I don’t I will hurt her feelings and draw the ridicule of people who already think me odd. Being haunted by cows and calves and hens as I chow down — thinking to myself, “I must do better”. Then, hiding from vegan groups feeling like an utter failure. This is 6 years in to being vegan.
I do my very best — and 99.9% of the time I am vegan in the truest sense of the word. I struggled with the vegan policing, I felt constantly judged and not good enough. Some of that judgement is my own vegan police officer living in my head. Hell, I already feel not good enough in the world, I don’t need any more help in feeling not good enough — but many vegans seem all too anxious to prove I am worse even than I thought. But I will continue on my own vegan journey, even if they want to throw me out of the vegan bus.
I do not wear leather any more but my wallet is made of cow’s skin and in good condition, so I keep it and use it. My pre-vegan furniture is leather I am literally sitting on the lost lives of several cows as I type this. My pre-vegan lounge room rug is karakul wool purchased in Namibia during our honeymoon many years ago, it will last a lifetime (My lifetime, the lifetime of the sheep are now gone…but their lives provided livelihood for people living on the margins of wild areas in poverty and fed their families… there are many injustices and many solutions, sustainable livelihood saves wildlife).
I avoid palm oil where I can, this is as much a vegan issue to me as milk, eggs and honey — because orang-utans, elephants, cats and myriad other mammals and birds lose their lives to the ever growing palm oil plantations in South East Asian countries. As do human populations who once cohabited peacefully with the wildlife, they too are dispossessed by Super Palm Oil mono-culture. I talk about palm oil in other vegan groups and get ridiculed and shut down, so who is the judge and who decides what is vegan and what is not? We can all care for cows, sheep, hens, goats, ducks… but throw in a cousin primate in the mix, beings who are dispossessed for a ubiquitous vegetable product… who are dying in large numbers and I have taken this vegan thing too far apparently (while simultaneously not taking it far enough).
Does your head in!
I am a compassionate conservationist. I have been active for the individuals of many species, not just signing but also creating campaigns to save lives, change minds, seek new ways of being as humans that will allow us to co-exist in peace with other beings — animals and their environments and relationships. But, even all that is not enough for people who hold absolutist vegan views. They apparently don’t struggle, they apparently have a clear line and the wherewithal to stop using all animal products (good on them!) but so many then become police, judge and juror on my life. On the lives of other people, who just like me, are doing their best.
Live your own life and encourage me to do the best I can, please.
I do so much less harm now than I ever did. Maybe I am vegetarian 0.1% of the time, and vegan 99.9% of the time and for the vegan absolutists that means I am the devil, the problem. It is unfair and unrealistic. I am an easy target — a much easier target than animal agriculture industry and governments that subsidise them and Industry Peak Bodies that promote eating more beef and putting pork on your fork and that lamb roasts turn you into Hollywood superstars. Yep, my 0.1% non-vegan moments make me Enemy No 1.
I am an easier target because I am showing up and trying my best, which isn’t good enough and never will be to people for whom 99.9% is not good enough. I am just a woman doing my very best who fails. Falls, repeatedly over a stumbling block of psychological need for milk chocolate and sugar sometimes.
I fail. Then, I get up and keep on keeping on, because I must, for them, the animals whom I claim as kin.
I created this series of images to encourage others to get back up when you fall. To ask questions and seek to be the best you can be. I know vegan absolutists think people like me ‘dilute’ the vegan message. Fair enough they can think what they like, what I want more than anything is to encourage others into doing their best, and when their best is reached, to try a bit harder. We all struggle. Supporting one another and encouraging people to have conversations that matter, to encourage people to ask questions and to answer them with love and understanding, to create community and invite people into safe space. We do it for the animals, for the planet, for each other. We are all here showing up, that is awesome. Keep on coming back.
For every Cow I ever ate, for every Pig I ever cooked, for every Chicken I ever bought BBQ’d, for every Chicken’s egg omelette made and eaten, for the Cow’s skin leather jackets, the Cow’s skin leather couches, the Cow’s skin leather wallets and belts…. I grieve and am sorry, I am doing my best and sometimes I fail to live up to my perfect ideal, but I keep on keeping on, doing my best.
I want to encourage others and help grow a movement. To grow that movement we have to tend it with love and understanding and humour. To grow a movement where people have a sense of belonging that we are proud of and create a safe space to invite others into, as they unpack years of socialisation, overcome our own psychological resistance and change what is essentially a fundamental security — the food we eat, the clothes we wear, the relationships we have and our very identity.
Be the best you can be, then try harder, fail, then fail better.
Feel free to share these images & please link them to: https://www.facebook.com/groups/fapvv/
