I went vegetarian because my partner was one. When I moved into their apartment it felt weird to start cooking meat in her place considering thinking about how meat was created made her cry. We didn’t really understand the full weight of what dairy, eggs and other animal products entailed at the time.

To be honest, the real trigger for me was my health. I was about 35 kg more than I weight now and was diagnosed with pre-diabetes. At the time I was giving my cat insulin and saw what my own future looked like. I remember googling “What can I do to prevent getting diabetes” and I found Dr. Greger’s website Nutrition Facts and Dr. Bernard’s PCRM. I’m so glad I found it too, since I was already vegetarian eating only meat really didn’t make sense to me, keto just felt like bullshit but the explanations found on the vegan sites aligned with what I knew about biology and chemistry. I looked at the actual statistics too, vegans were clearly in a lower risk category across the board for metabolic disorders like heart disease and diabetes. I decided to make the plunge to a whole foods plant based diet but still didn’t really call myself vegan because of stereotypes and propaganda convincing me that actual vegans were crazy.

Once the meat and animal product goggles were off though I started seeing animal exploitation for what it was. A structural oppression of living and thinking beings for no reason. It caused a cognitive dissonance in me whenever I started to notice it and when discussing it with my partner we decided to become not only plant-based but vegan in the animal rights sense as well. Something was still not right though as I looked through reddit’s vegan community and saw a lot of nonsense and businesses advertising questionable products. It wasn’t until I found the vegan circlejerk did it really start to click. I joined the discord and met potato who at the time was the top mod but also the first vegan I met who really cared and was understanding of me and other people who would join this chat room. Unfortunately due to the dynamics of online communities it fractured several times and they eventually moved on but in that time I became one of the most active mods of the subreddit. Running the subreddit was a mixed bag, I was exposed to a lot of stuff I would have preferred not to be but also literally dozens of people would reach out to me directly telling me these stupid memes really affected them and made them change their lives to become vegan and that meant a lot of me. As for potato, I still keep in touch with them and consider potato one of my friends to this day 7 years later. In this time my commitment to the animals has only grown, I was able to make the case to one of my best friends who made the plunge and have regained my health in the process looking and feeling better in my 40s than at any other part of my life.

As reddit changed and my job got more intense I stepped back from moderating the subreddit but later decided to try and host this lemmy server and now this is where we all are.