Dear mentally ill vegans. This is for you.

What a title.

It’s true though. Not because to be vegan you must be mentally ill but because a lot of mentally ill people are vegan.

I know it is difficult to talk about it but we have to. Because we exist. 

Whenever you say the words mentally ill people get weird about it. It scares them. The unknown scares them. What they don’t understand scares them.

It makes sense if you think about it. 

Mentally ill people are portrayed as crazy violent abusers by Hollywood and true-crime fiction – which I read all the time, don’t get me wrong – is monetizing our disorders to create the perfect villain.

And even when shows and movies do try to portray us honestly, they add unnecessary violence to the mix just to keep the audience entertained. It sucks to be the one whose illness is exploited for the views, though.

It took me a long time to accept who I was, and I am still struggling and probably always will. But I have to talk about hard things to make life easier for future generations. I don’t ever want to see another being suffer due to societies intolerance.

This is for mentally ill vegans.

We wake up every day in pain yet we still muster enough compassion for those who are less fortunate. Even on our darkest days, we still continue to help and love and give. Our heart knows no boundaries and the love we possess is infinite.

We have our own demons but they are never strong enough to stop us from offering a helping hand to those who need us.

We are shamed, belittled and abused but we still never fucking stop doing the right thing. It would be so easy to use our illness as an excuse to pay someone to cut the throat of a mother cow, but we don’t do that. 

We just know the pain too much to allow someone to suffer because of us. We know how it feels to be abused and hated and forgotten about.

We know what happens when people don’t care about your well-being. That is why we keep going. That is why we don’t stop. 

We are mentally ill vegans. Mentally ill animal rights activists. Mentally ill advocates. Mentally ill people who love and care and feel and hope.

We exist and we are here. You can point fingers or yell at us but we are still not different from you. 

Our own pain and discrimination we experience fuel us to speak up for non-human animals. If there is something we know about veganism is that living it is our way of dealing with our own suffering. 

When we help pigs and fish and butterflies, we help ourselves. Being vegan is a part of our therapy. 

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Tanja