The Importance of Self-Love in the Vegan Movement
"How do you love when your heart is broken?
How do you speak when you feel outspoken?
I can forgive and be forgiven
By learning to heal with a heart wide open"-Nothing More,
“I’ll Be OK”
Others vs. You
Think of someone you love (it doesn’t have to be a human), and one thing you love about them. I think of my dog, who’s basically my child, and how her curly tail and the entire back half of her body wiggles with excitement when I come in the door; and sometimes when she’s really excited, she makes this adorable trill-howl. I repeat the sound, and that’s how we communicate that we’re happy to see each other.
Now, think of one thing you love about yourself. That’s a little more difficult, isn’t it? To think of just one thing that I love about myself, not just something I’m good at or some aspect of my personality I like, but truly love about myself, I usually draw a blank. It’s so difficult to find love for ourselves because we know ourselves too well; we know all our dirty secrets and dwell on our flaws, making it sometimes difficult to see the good in us.
Over the past year or so, I’ve thought a lot about this idea of self-love, and I often tried to write it off as something I don’t need to worry about because I’m not that kind of person that needs to feel that way. But the more I tried to make myself believe it, the more I realized how wrong I was. While I won’t claim to have everything figured out and am still very much a work-in-progress, here are seven reasons why self-love is essential for veganism and the progression of the movement if we ever hope to create a vegan world.
1. Self-Love is Strength
Vegans are often called weak for caring about animals. But that couldn’t be further from the truth. Weakness is following the herd at any cost; strength is leaving the herd to forge your own path. Weakness is causing others pain; strength is intervening and removing that pain. Weakness is apathy; strength is love. And when you find love for yourself, there’s nothing in the entire world that can stop you because you’ve already conquered the highest hurdle. Because loving yourself, even though you once were, and sometimes still are, weak and hateful, is one of the hardest things a person can do.
2. Mental Health
We are always too worried about the animals, the environment, other people, and our own physical health, which means we push mental health to the farthest possible backburner, almost so that we don’t even realize it’s something that needs to be nurtured. Your mind is another part of your body, but it is far more complex, which means it needs the most effort to stay strong. You can't just start eating more vegetables to heal it; you need to continuously feed it with love and positivity.
3. Love ALL Animals
Humans are animals. You are an animal. I am an animal. It’s funny how calling someone an animal has such a terrible connotation, but it’s simply a fact. Humans are just another species of animal. And if we want to care about every other species of animal, why do we care so little for ourselves? It's important to remember that, like everyone else, we often make mistakes. The world is imperfect, but that's what makes it beautiful. Finding self-love means finding beauty in imperfection.
4. A Loving Society
We want to create a world that is not only compassionate toward nonhuman animals, but also to human animals. A “vegan world” is not just a world in which people don’t eat meat or eggs and don’t wear wool or leather and don’t visit aquariums or rodeos. A vegan world is a society of love, compassion, and empathy. It is a utopia for all in it, including the humans that recognized their wrongs and worked tirelessly to fix them. It’s a world where mistakes are appreciated, honesty is power, and compassion is key. It is not a perfect world, because perfection is impossible, but a beautiful world because of every single imperfection.
5. Pain Makes You Strong
You don’t always have to rely on yourself to love yourself. I often think of the worst times in my life, but looking back on them now, I don’t remember them painfully. Those moments of life created the core of my values. Those times when I felt like the world was crushing me made me so much stronger. I am the person I am today because of it, and those times when I doubted myself, even hated myself, most are the ones that made me love myself so much more. It's what keeps me motivated to spread the vegan message because I know everyone is capable of compassion.
6. Love Others First
Find self-love through others. I said before that self-love doesn’t come easily to me, probably like most people, but I’ve found it particularly difficult with my anxiety always whispering bad thoughts in my head, like a devil on my shoulder. But when I looked within myself and found this untapped well of compassion and empathy for the plight of animals, I could start to see good things in myself reflected back from that well. My love for animals makes me love myself every day. No matter how terrible things might seem at times, I can wake up each morning and go to sleep each night knowing that I am an incredible person helping to end thousands of years of injustice.
7. Be Proud of Your Convictions
The world today is constantly trying to bring us down. We’ve seen many vegans fall to this pressure; they weren’t prepared to stand up against it, unsure of their convictions. When everyone around you is telling you that you’re wrong, that you’re stupid, that you’re weak, you need to be able to find the strength inside yourself to not be scared away. You must have the courage to stay, unwavering, and greet their hate with love.
To be an effective voice for justice, we must be strong. We are the animals' only hope, and we can’t carry that weight without the willingness to break our backs in the process. So when our strength is tested and we feel like giving up, we must have the ability to continue pressing forward.
be conscious, be kind, be vegan