Veganist: A Real Thing Racist. Sexist. Supremacist. All these words have one thing in common; you hear them everyday. They are splattered across all media platforms, so they are always right in your face. There are some words, however, that never get their recognition as a real problem. Veganist is a real thing, and it is a problem that many people face everyday. It is never talked about it in the news. It is never on social media. The personal stories of the harm that veganists cause are never told to the public, because to the public those stories do not matter. These stories should matter, they need to matter, and that is why I am sharing mine. In February of 2016 I woke up to my first migraine. It was like nothing I had ever gone through before. Imagine someone blasting rock music while drilling into your skull and punching you in the stomach at the same time. That is how I felt for 24 long days. Eventually I was hospitalized for a week and was told I had a Chiari Malformation and Chronic Migraines. I missed around 70 days of my junior year in high school. I discovered that my biggest trigger was dairy. I had already been vegetarian for 2 years prior to that, so having to go vegan did not seem like a big deal to me. Little did I know that telling people I was now a vegan would blow up my entire world. My first experience with a veganist was before I even knew that word existed. I was sitting at lunch, eating a salad, when a girl across from me sneered. “How can you possibly eat that?”, she said. “I thought everybody ate salads.”, was my reply. “Well of course everybody eats salad stupid, but they don’t eat them like you. You don’t even have cheese or ham on your salad. You are eating rabbit food.” At this point she had really ticked me off, but since I am a nice person I just smiled back at her. “I realize that you might not eat like me, and that is okay, but I can’t eat meat or cheese because I’m a vegan. That’s why my salad looks the way it does.” I thought this was a very nice answer given her attitude with me earlier, but she did not agree. In fact, she burst out laughing. I will never forget the next words that came out of her mouth. “Oh so you’re one of those people.” The words just slithered out of her mouth like venom. “Well Miss High and Mighty,” she continued, “do you realize that by being vegan you are actually killing more animals than if you ate normal because now you are eating all their food?” That is the exact moment I reached my breaking point with this conversation. “Do I look like I am grazing a field right now?”, I shot back at her. In anger I got up and left without even looking back. I had never been so mad in my life. Without realizing it I was already growing stronger for the next time somebody tried to shoot me down. Unsurprisingly, it did not take long for the news to spread that we now had a vegan in school. …show more content…
I was the only one. My own little vegan island. Even if there were other vegans out there they were too afraid to come forward and say it because the kids at our school were so mean. Lunch became a zoo, and I was the animal inside the glass. For some reason it became everyone else’s business what I ate for lunch, and they would find some way to make fun of it. Just when I thought I was going to drop out of my lunch and eat in the bathroom, I met a vegan teacher. Even though she was a teacher, students treated her the same way they treated me. They would come in everyday and ask if her or I wanted some beef jerky. They would bring chicken nuggets and pepperoni pizza into class just to make the room smell like meat. The cruelty of people has not stopped, or even slowed down, since then. A few months ago I received a notification that I had a new Twitter message from a person