On Eating Meat

I've been conscientious about my meat consumption for about 4 years now. For two years I rarely ate meat then for the next two I only ate fish. Recently, I gave up fish as well. I've been pondering the viability and ethical nature of raising animals for consumption. I am human, I do believe meat is delicious. My reluctance to consume meat comes from a few different places:
1. Environmental Factors
2. Animal Ethics/ Valuing lives (looking into my dog's eyes and hating humans = a shifting idea of equality)
3. Health (antibiotics in meat, fat consumption, etc)

I could go into all of these things but I won't. I assume any reader sympathetic with this blog should be intelligent enough to understand someone's reasons for not eating meat in an industrial setting.

And so if I can control most of these factors- growing my meat and loving it before consuming it- could I eat meat?
Could I eat rabbits I grew in a cage? Could I break a turkey's neck for a delicious turkey and avocado sandwich? For a couple weeks I thought I could. But we just added a new rabbit. And we have two chickens and I love those little fuckers. And they all have the most hilarious personalities. Could I take a life for a meal?

I don't think so. I really don't think I could feel any more justified doing that than I could by taking a human life. It's more socially acceptable, obviously, to take a non-human animal's life for consumption. I don't know!

Maybe I'll remain a vegetarian for life. Would that be so bad?

I have a pretty prestigious internship doing exactly what my college education has prepared me to do. It is something I worked hard to obtain and something I am very close to losing because of my brain.
Panic attacks, agoraphobia, anxiety, what ever you want to call it hits me before I even wake up on Tuesdays when I am scheduled to go in. It starts with a sort of sleep paralysis. The alarm goes off and I fall back asleep- frozen in fear. I dare not move a single muscle until the alarm goes off again. When I finally do wake up I am wide eyed. I cannot breathe. I cannot move. I berate myself, encourage myself, distract myself but nothing works. It's a sort of complicated ritual actually. If I see the clock change from the time I am supposed to be getting ready to the time I am supposed to leave to the time I am supposed to have arrived I feel worse. Usually I cannot see the time change because it is so horrible. Often I sleep through it. Today was so bad I nearly threw up on myself, afraid I wouldn't be able to even move enough to not throw up in my bed.
I cannot get out of bed. I cannot leave my house. If someone held my hand and led me outside I think most days that would work. Today I would have fought someone if they had tried to make me. I probably would have cried and punched and threw up. That didn't happen but it sort of did in my brain. I do not want to feel like a tantruming child. I do not want to feel like I do not deserve the things I have worked so hard for.

In bed today, while I was fighting this horrible battle with myself, I found myself thinking about my inadequacies. If I live on a farm and have animals depending on me for their food and lives would I have too much anxiety to tend to them? Would I be unable to rise to water the fields? I know I could. I don't have the answer for why. But maybe when my land is more than a plot on a concrete block, agoraphobia won't kick in until I get to the roads that surround it.
I don't want to throw up right outside my front door anymore. I don't want to lose money, respect, and maybe even jobs just because my own brain stops me. I don't want to keep taking these medications that don't work.

I'm stuck. I need out of this life with these strange expectations to wear high heels and have a powdered face and turn in crisp sheets of white paper in time for arbitrary deadlines. I have run away to other countries, into boys arms, and into my dreams where no one can criticize me and none of those things have worked. And as much emphasis as I put on escaping and how much I know that doesn't actually work I know a more natural lifestyle will. It will make me feel like living again and if it doesn't there is no hope.

The Most Important Thing

We are the children of a plasticized society full of depression masked by consumerism and pharmaceuticals that seem to cause more problems than they help. Our lives are so unsatisfying that even our pets are on antidepressants and anti-anxiety medications. We are the children of the loss of skill, craft, and survival knowledge. We blindly follow our technology into the middle of nowhere, believing the directions on the LCD screen are more accurate than the sun. We do not understand how our clothing is made or our houses. We are the children of prophesy, of the books that warned of our downfall. Our recreational drugs are packaged in easy-to-swallow ovals like Brave New World predicted. There are television screens in every room, like in 1984. Our information can be changed in a whim, without tubes and papers but with typing and edits. We are a race of people who are lost in piles of useless trinkets from places we'll never see that are soon turned to trash. We are a race of people who, in our free time, stare into the face of advertisements, spend a majority of our time doing unnecessary tasks to earn false money, and spend it on what we saw advertised the night before. Our food is packaged, our nutrients are shaped like cartoon characters. Our meat suffers and dies by immigrant hands in unimaginable conditions and is consumed by an apathetic public.
Our nation is constantly at war from Eurasia to Eastasia, Iraq to Iran to Afghanistan.

We are the ignorant, spoiled children bred from parents in carpeted cubicles. We studied, finished our "education." We have worked with clean hands, serving food to obese people and selling unnecessary goods to empty-eyed women. We have played sports, we have letters on our jackets, we are collegiate stamped-and-approved and still, we are unhappy. We are in debt. We are at a stand-still. We are expected to continue on this path but Death haunts us and it shows in the marks we make in our skin. It shows in the medical records and bills that rain in from the street to our front doors. We are statistics. We are unsatisfied. We have lived this life and we have decided that we do not want to live it. Some of us have tried to take our own lives. Others cannot shake the feelings of unsettling anxiety. We are struggling in wealth. We despair among the things we did not make, did not earn, and do not understand. We don't want out, we need out.

Suicide is not an option. That would make us weak. But this is our life and we only have a certain number of years on this crumbling earth. We are alive and therefore we are obligated to do our best. This is The Most Important Thing.

We will learn the things our ancestors knew. We will grow our own food. We will make our own clothes. We will be manipulated instead by the rise and fall of the sun rather than the flicker of commercial breaks. We will suffer but it will be a natural suffering. Our bodies will feel the air. Our hands will feel the earth. And we will be happy without orange plastic bottles filled with ovals. And we will be happy without closets full of mismatched shoes. And we will be happy to be on the earth and to breathe the air and to live this life that we cannot, and should not want, to escape.

Nicole