Three years ago, towards the end of August, Alex and I made a life-altering decision six hours into an eight hour drive home from vacation. It was the start of our relationship, and has been one of the defining factors ever since. When we decided to give up dairy, eggs and other non-meat animal bi-products, I didn’t really give it much thought besides how I was going to “get through” that specific day without cheese or eggs. I thought I would be overwhelmed, both by cravings and the sheer amount of food we were no longer willing to eat. I prepared myself for the worst, but I knew I was ready. I jumped with both feet, half expecting to fail but ready to try just the same.

As it turned out, there was very little change in my life. I swapped out the yogurt and milk in my fridge for soy milk and soy yogurt, and discovered Earth Balance butter. We tried a couple new restaurants, but for the most part ate at all our old favorites. I cooked in a little more, tried some new ingredients. When pizza commercials came on TV, I changed the channel. I still craved cheese, especially when eating around omnivores, but I channeled my energy into school and my new relationship. Sometimes I would slip - a handful of chocolate chips here, a cracker with dairy in it there. I remember Alex and I taking a trip to see my grandparents in October for my 21st birthday and taking a “vegan break” which involved several slices of New York pizza and a lot of pancakes. Alex and I reasoned that Peter Singer had the right idea, and that if completely denying ourselves animal products was going to cause us to stop being vegans, then we should give ourselves a little “treat” now and again and imbibe. I gave up cheese and eggs, but I didn’t really give up wanting them. We didn’t want to be “those vegans”; too extreme, too fanatical, too strident. Some compromise, we though, is necessary to make people feel comfortable. We took the Paris Exception again, when Alex moved to DC for the first semester of his Masters program, when I visited a friend in North Carolina, and finally when Alex moved back and we went on vacation with his mom. It was a week long vacation, and we stuffed ourselves silly with “forbidden items”.

That summer, we ordered several animal rights philosophy books off the internet, among them Gary Francione’s Introduction to Animal Rights. We read them, and for the first time since I became a vegetarian at age seven, I had a true change in thinking about animals.

What brings this up is a post I read today at Vegan Feminist Agitator about the internal shift in how we conceptualize animals that seems to set vegans apart from non-vegans, in tandem with my new job - or more accurately, my new co-workers. Most of my co-workers have only recently found out I am vegan, you see, and out of the five who know, four have made the comment that they would be vegan except they “could never give up cheese”. It’s a pretty common excuse comment, I know - I made it myself, dozens of times. Even after I “gave up” cheese, I still clung to this notion that cheese (and milk and eggs and even honey) were somehow things that I had a right to. Even after “sacrificing them” I still felt like, well, I was making a sacrifice by not consuming them. They were still a treat, still an item that I felt I should somehow be able to consume. Which brings me to that summer I had my true Gestalt Shift, the summer that ended my first year of veganism.

A Gestalt Shift is essentially a true shift in intellectual position - a change in thinking so profound that it alters your whole outlook on the world, and changes the way you think. Not just the actions you take, but the way you view things. A perceptual transformation. In some ways, the transformation from omnivore to vegan in requires at least a small Gestalt Shift (after all, you must come to assign some value non-humans that you did not previously allow them), but I think that for some vegans, it isn’t all that big of a change. After all, most humans assign independent value to the non-human animals we keep as pets. It isn’t that difficult to say okay, if my dog deserves not to be killed at eaten, then a pig doesn’t either. Our rational, categorical minds can understand this, and most of us are socialized early on to believe that non-human pet animals deserve love, kindness and at least some consideration. The kind of veganism that results from the extension of this concept is the kind that says we should refrain from harming non-humans, but still allows us to have some rights to them - to their bodies, and the products of their bodies - because they still “belong” to us. This is how I felt about animals when I first went vegan. We (humans) owned them, but it was not right or acceptable to harm them if we could avoid doing so. Perhaps, one day, I would have a cow of my own to milk, and some chickens whose eggs I could eat, but until then I would avoid consuming animal products unless I felt I had to, to protect my veganism. In other words, I still had the rights to their products, as long as they weren’t harmed. And if it was in their best interest, I would consume the products.

This is probably nothing new to most people - that it takes a pretty large shift in thinking to go from it’s-not-okay-to-harm-animals-but-it-is-okay-to-treat-them-like-we-have-rights-to-them to we-have-no-right-to-own-or-use-anything-they-do-are-or-make, but it’s this concept that struck me dumb that summer, two years ago. I had my Gestalt Shift that day, and suddenly it became easy, simple, effortless to live without cheese or eggs or milk. I no longer had the desire to consume them, because suddenly, they weren’t mine to consume anymore than the flesh of a human child would be. I went from “someday, I’ll have cheese again…” to the sudden realization that I never wanted cheese again. It wasn’t that it tasted bad, or smelled bad, or looked bad  - it was just that somewhere in my head, a switch went off that changed my thought process completely. It was sudden, profound and unasked for, and once it was done there was no going back.

That shift changed a lot more than just the way I looked at cheese, and forced me to re-evaluate a lot of other things in my life, but I’ve never been more thankful for anything, ever. Unlike my original transition to veganism, my Gestalt Shift changed a lot in my life. In many ways, it was the shakeup I feared when I first switched diets. I suddenly came to understand why so many vegans acted the way they did (or I perceived they did) towards omnivores and vegetarians, and why they could be so hostile. I started to feel uncomfortable eating with still-omnivorous friends. I started talking to my non-vegan friends about why they should be vegan. It went from being a “personal choice” to something that was so clearly right for everyone that I wondered why I didn’t see it long ago. I struggled with some aspects, but for the most part I finally felt like I was doing the right things. Some things didn’t change - I still didn’t hold with PETA’s activism techniques, for example - and I was glad because it helped me to understand that this wasn’t just a fad or passing set of ideals. Somehow, I had really and truly changed my internal wiring.

Three years in, I wonder why I didn’t see the bright clear line I see now before. Like Alex, like Marla over at Vegan Feminist Agitator, I still don’t always understand why other people aren’t capable of seeing it and switching their own internal switch. I still don’t know how to get people to make that switch, and I don’t always know how to deal with people who haven’t made it, but are otherwise good people. I don’t know quite how to come to terms with most of my own family’s studied, determined ignorance. I don’t always know how to relate to people about my veganism, because I don’t know how to convey the profound change it has caused within me in a way that they can understand. I don’t even always know how to relate to other vegans who don’t share the same viewpoints. What I do know is that Marla is right - I am an ordinary person. I am not unique. I am smart, yes, but many people are smarter. I observe my ethics and try my best to act in accordance with my morals, but so do many others. I once said, “I could never give up cheese” when veganism was mentioned. Somehow, my switch got flipped from a position that said “I could never give up cheese,” and left logic and morality there, to a position that said “Cheese who?”