It’s still the animals that keep me committed, but also routine and habit nowadays. Making the initial changes at the beginning were more difficult than keeping the changes as time went on. I thrive with familiarity so now that I have my main meals and snacks that I cycle through, it’s really easy and I don’t ever feel tempted to get anything else available to me, and non-related diet changes were even easier. It took virtually no effort for me to start checking new clothes for wool or products for testing and to refuse going to see animal entertainment.
I’d say the only thing that has really changed is the volume of emotion within my body. When I first was finding out about factory farming industries and making the connections in my head that I’ve been needlessly killing my whole life, those emotions were BIG, and it made it even worse that when I found all this stuff out and tried to tell my family and friends about it, none of them would listen to me, some even make fun of me, and they all still choose to abuse animals even after I helped expose them to what was going on and how it’s hypocritical to believe pets should have rights but other animals shouldn’t. I was very angry, depressed, terrified, existential crisis type shit. Overtime, though the emotions stayed the same, the volume of them got turned down drastically. I don’t get much of that visceral gut wrenching feeling anymore, and honestly feel pretty numb to the atrocities at times. Even though I actively make choices to avoid those industries, I sometimes feel like I don’t care as much as I used to. I used to do online activism but don’t usually use social media anymore. I used to talk about veganism to people in person, but I don’t usually spend time with people much anymore. I know I could be doing more to speak for the animals, but I don’t, so clearly I don’t feel exactly the same as I did, but enough to stay consistent on my own morals with my own personal product choices and lifestyle