Since I was a little girl, I’ve always been described as a caring person. My parents, like any, would tell any friends and family that’d listen about how special their daughter was. I can’t say much about the first years of my life, but for as long as I can remember, I’ve always possessed a natural empathy for people and animals. When I was fourteen, however,  I came face to face with something that would put this empathy to the test.

I still vividly remember coming into my kitchen and seeing the black pan my mom had cooked countless meals in. I walked over to it and peaked in, curious about what new recipe she was trying out. To my surprise, there was a large cut of beef laying there,  raw and bloody in the pan. The meat itself wasn’t what surprised to me-- I was a lifelong meat lover. There was just something about this steak that was different. Something that made my stomach churn.  It wasn’t the size, or the blood. It was the shape that had struck me. The straight line along the side where I knew a bone had been cut away. The round, sloping edges that I’d become familiar with through the anatomy models in my health classroom. The strong and powerful look of muscle that I’d seen before outlined in the fur of my dog who peeked her head into the kitchen. I turned to looked at her, the animal I had loved dearly since she was just a puppy, and then back at what was left of an animal whose mother had loved it just the same. I felt my heart ache, as if knew how devastating it was to love and care for someone just for them to be killed, skinned, and placed in a black pan on a kitchen counter. I was confused as to how something like that could happen. I called to my mother, asking her what this steak was for. Having heard that I was in the kitchen she replied “That’s dinner tonight.”

And for the second time, I froze. The reality of it all came at me like a ton of bricks, smashing the glass bubble I had around never thinking about what I had been eating all this time. At that very moment I decided to become a vegetarian. And in that moment, I took a large step into independence. I didn’t know a single person who didn’t eat meat. I didn’t have anyone around me who could say “oh, make sure you don’t eat this” or “here’s some great substitutes” or “here’s how to keep a healthy, meatless diet”. There was none of that. Just me, vegetarianism, and a step in the right direction. From then on I had to research and plan everything I ate. I went onto forums where vegetarians talked about substitutions for protein and how to have a balanced diet. I went out grocery shopping and made all my own meals, keeping a mental inventory of what my body needed and what healthy ways I had of getting it.

When I tell people I’m a vegetarian, they immediately think two things. One: “wow, that’s really cool that you love animals”, and two: “how do you live without bacon?”.  These aren’t bad reactions, of course, but they’ll never know how much this really means to me. I’d been a dependent person my whole life. Everything I did, I did with my family, class, or some other group. But in the last four years, I’ve learned to take things upon myself to do the research and take the necessary action. I’ve become independent in ways I didn’t think I needed to but now understand how much I did. It wasn’t easy at times, but that never stopped me from doing what I thought was right, because in that moment, the value of another life was, and still is, far more important that my comfort.