Using Veganism For Fame

Last fall, I gave this speech shortly after the finale of Survive The Raft. I struggled immensely with whether or not I wanted to be vegan anymore.

I originally gave this speech at the 2023 Kind-Hearted Campout last October. I still feel greatly challenged and unfortunately, somewhat confused as of late. Re-reading this has helped me remember that I am allowed to question every aspect of my life. I write to allow that experience to move through me, rather than attach myself to one singular immutable belief. Some edits have been made to the original speech. 

I have been vegan for about a decade, and it used to be so easy for me. Lately, it’s presented me with greater challenges than I could’ve imagined. 

This is my 2nd Kind Hearted Campout. I was here in 2021 for the inaugural event and intended to return last year, instead, I found myself trapped on a raft in the Pacific Ocean just off the coast of Panama with a Discovery Channel production crew tracking my every move. I was filming a new survival reality show called Survive The Raft. It was intended to replicate a real-life social experiment that took place 50 years ago in 1973. The original experiment wanted to see how diverse humans interacted with one another to cross the Atlantic Ocean on a raft. The modern project sought to bring together people from all walks of life for a common goal; money. To see if we could put our differences aside or tear each other apart. There were liberals, conservatives, hunters, religious folk, atheists, and one vegan. 

I’m not a money-motivated person at all. Please don’t take that as me glossing over the necessity of money or the positive impact that it can make, but my morals don’t change depending on financial gain. Many other contestants were there solely to win the cash prize, willing to forego all morals to take home cash. I was there to rock climb, dive into the middle of the ocean, and debate veganism and animal rights with anyone who would engage with me. 

I am no stranger to conflict and debate. In 2020 I competed at Miss USA and spent most of my year in constant conflict with Montana animal agriculturalists. I am certain this is almost entirely why I was cast on this show. When I first stepped on the raft, which was more like a barge, I felt confident about my veganism. As I boarded the Acali II (the name of the raft) I repeated “I am Earthling Ed, Earthling Ed is me” and looked forward to engaging with radically different people while competing in these survival challenges for the next 21 days. As many things go in life, my expectation is not what happened. My relationship with veganism turned into tears and frustration rather than conversation. There were 9 original cast members, two of which are professional spearfishers and the fishing was constant. Conversations around food were desperate as opposed to intentional. I found that when I tried to engage with the others about why eating fish was so important to them when we had a significant amount of food to consume other than that, they brushed me off saying things like “I understand your point and morally you’re probably right, but I am absolutely eating fish while I’m out here.” I was able to have a few short but important conversations, that of course the viewer does not have the opportunity to see on the actual show. 

The team sat together for every meal, while my plate was the only one not filled with fish, and I felt conflicted. At first, I considered taking the Liberation Pledge, meaning I wouldn’t sit at a table that served animal products. However, this competition was based on group trust and effort, and if I singled myself out, I wouldn’t have built that trust. I’m an introvert and I have to make specific intentions when building friendships and going out of my comfort zone to be accepted socially. Being an observant person, I can state with total confidence that the majority of trust and relationships are built through the sharing of something. Sharing an experience, sharing alcohol, the sharing of food, etc. Here on this raft, I had to sit at the table if I wanted to strengthen my relationships. If I wanted to win. 

I’ve experienced a fair amount of scrutiny over my words while competing in pageants and being very vocal about what I believe in and previously had no issues taking on a debate or challenge. About halfway through filming I stopped speaking intuitively and began obsessing over every word I said. This doesn’t imply that the words were necessarily the right ones, rather, I spent a significant amount of time ruminating over what I wanted to say, and what I had said in the past, and I became almost entirely detached from my surroundings. No one was directly insensitive to me about veganism, instead, it was as though my words were essentially meaningless and non-existent. Some people apologized to me for fishing out of necessity, not authenticity. The experience became a charade for me. I felt as though my being there had little to no positive impact on veganism, and if anything it hindered the movement.

Would all the viewers see about my way of life is that I couldn’t hold back tears or form a coherent sentence? My body became overwhelmed and unable to think clearly quickly after we began filming. Much of the time I was overwhelmed, confused, and anguished. 

One night after completing a challenge, I was on the verge of quitting.  I asked to speak to the show's psychiatrist. They took me into a small room and allowed me to have a video call with him. The laptop screen looked visually distorted, like the first moments of a psychedelic experience even though I was completely sober. The world almost appeared animated, cartoon-like, inanimate objects wavering like that of a live being. I should’ve left at that moment, but if I had, people would assume it was because I was too hungry. That a vegan couldn’t survive the experiment. So I stayed. 

The finale was months ago, and I did survive the raft. Surviving on rice, beans, and potatoes. I had many issues while on the raft, none of which was hunger. I left a winner technically, but I failed my mission to bring vegan awareness to one of the biggest television networks in the world. It was embarrassing, and at times completely debilitating. The stress and struggle of the competition itself, combined with my failure to communicate positively with others about animal rights walked me right into a horror story of my own making. 

When I returned home my body was consumed by an immeasurable amount of anxiety. I was distraught with the visceral realization that I had failed my mission to highlight veganism and everyone would see it. I desperately tried to tie up loose ends in my mind, falling into nightmares hoping to work out inconclusive emotions from this experience. I began having nightly sleep paralysis, intense paranoia, and severe brain fog. Before I was officially cast on Survive The Raft, my partner at the time and I had planned a trip to Greece. This trip ended up being 6 days after I returned from Panama. I had almost no time to process anything that happened during filming and was off to another country almost as soon as I returned. 

When my partner and I started dating, I told him the extent of my veganism and he mentioned he had previously been vegetarian, so this choice was familiar to him. I foolishly accepted this response, and now as I reflect I just laugh because, to me, a vegetarian is essentially the same as an omnivore in terms of being able to find food. The difference between vegan and vegetarian is massive. We all know this. But he didn’t. From the first day we set foot in Athens I immediately struggled to find food. Most authentic places didn’t have any options, and if they did, I was given the wrong item. My partner wanted a true Grecian adventure filled with cultural foods and activities, and I was thinking to myself “How long can I go without eating, but not pass out, so I don’t continue to be an inconvenience?” I couldn’t help but feel that I was taking this vacation away from him. 

One night at dinner after asking the waiter dozens of questions about the menu, landing on a salad option, I looked at my partner and said “Is this difficult for you?” He lied and said no. I told him my struggles on the show and how I felt I had failed my purpose. He had nothing to say. We sat in silence much of the time thereafter. 

I’m not a big drinker. I genuinely dislike most alcohol, but to find a shared experience as we were very clearly pulling apart from each other, I opted to drink with him, he really enjoyed his alcohol. Considering I had hardly been eating, I became very drunk very quickly. Later that night, as he slept soundly, I fell into a terrorizing episode of sleep paralysis. Screaming on the inside with everything I could, feeling as if I was being dragged down by someone or something powerful and angry, trapped inside of myself. I eventually broke out of the paralysis and clamored to the bathroom. My hands were dehydrated and shaking. My head was pounding. I hadn’t slept in what felt like weeks. My undereyes were purple and strained. I looked in the mirror and said “What if I’m wrong?” 

Within two weeks of returning from Greece my partner and I broke up. He said he connected with people the most over sharing food and he just couldn’t do that with me. The same night, I went to dinner and told my friends what happened over a bare romaine salad. They all shrugged and muttered that they would probably have done the same thing. Nobody got it. Nobody understood the weight. My entire identity over the past decade was woven by veganism, and now it was the thing that was disrupting my life the most. Food had now become isolation and alienation so I mostly stopped eating, and I hadn’t had a full night's sleep since I last slept on the Acali II. 

I’ve been vegan for a decade. And I was vegetarian on and off since High School before that. Veganism makes absolute and total sense. I in no way wish to support the commodification and exploitation of non-human animals. It’s a very easy choice for me. But as I navigate the world, I find it pushes back on me. A lot. In previous years, I was comfortable standing strong in my choices. I didn’t care who I “offended” or whose feelings I hurt in the name of animal rights. But I found over time, I grew lonelier and lonelier. I don’t go to Friendsgiving’s. I’m often invited to the birthday party, but not the birthday dinner. It’s easier for me to be removed from the equation than to seek to find a solution. Let me add, that I have very kind and very loving friends who do their best to support me. But, it’s easier for them to not invite me to their dinner than to find a restaurant that everyone can agree on. And it is unfortunate, but if I lined up my 15 closest friends, none of them are vegan. Or even vegetarian. I feel ashamed saying this to this specific crowd, but I have always struggled to find my place within the community. Even now, I’m not entirely sure how to reconcile that. 

Around this time of my struggles, I confided in a vegan activist friend, she was kind but I sensed a level of distance; she encouraged me to only date fellow vegans and to spend more time with vegan friends. All very sound advice. 

I confided in my non-vegan friends. Most of them had no idea what to say, they couldn’t truly grasp the gravity, to them, it was just “food”. And the others shrugged and said maybe I shouldn’t be vegan anymore if it was causing me this much distress, and that made me pause. Could I give it up? What would that look like and how would that feel? It’s something I couldn’t understand. One of my best friends made a simple suggestion: Go to dinner, try something non-vegan, and see how it feels. 

Remember when Miley Cyrus said she was no longer vegan because her brain didn’t work and then she ate salmon once and suddenly it worked again? So then I thought, what if I do this and everything dissipates? What if I feel amazing and I have all the friends and partners in the world and I’m invited to every birthday dinner ever and what if I’ve been wrong this whole time?! Would it then all make sense? Because what if I’m wrong? What is veganism is wrong?

So I did it. I went to dinner with this friend, and I ate fish. And nothing happened. Actually, a little stomach ache happened. But my cognitive functioning stayed the same, damn it, Miley. No cathartic experience, no massive breakthrough. If anything, guilt and shame crept over me throughout the meal. My friend wasn’t judging me, she’d support me through anything. But I judged myself. Heavily. Did anything I said or believed have any legitimacy then? I had no idea what to do. I had no idea who I was. 

My anxiety, sleep paralysis, and borderline eating disorder had become so severe that I turned to Ketamine IV therapy. I’m happy to say that it helped a great deal. I felt optimistic and light. It was as though I was able to watch my emotions pass me by and not feel the need to cling to them. One could argue that through this IV therapy, I suddenly mastered stoicism. Or, you could say that my dissociation had become so severe that I no longer cared about anyone or anything. 

A month later I went on a trip to Hawaii with some new friends who hardly knew me. I ordered fish one night at dinner. I needed to see how it would feel to be around people who didn’t see me as “the vegan.” I didn’t want to be the person asking a myriad of questions about what’s cooked with what, and what has egg in it or otherwise. I wanted to point at anything on the menu and eat it and not have a conversation about my food choices. A conversation that is usually met with resistance and discomfort. I was just their new friend, eating dinner with them, that’s all. The fish was mediocre. I regretted it.

A month went by and I found myself in Norway, somehow again with a bunch of strangers, surviving together, but this time I was in the Arctic Circle. I was staying in this collection of pods in the middle of nowhere. There was one groundskeeper who was also the cook. She was from France and when I told her I was vegan her eye roll was the shot heard around the world. Mostly, I ate small servings of things that were easy to make, but never a hearty meal. One night she made crepes and all 8 of us sat around the table in a small mostly windowed pod with the Northern Lights above us. Here I was once again, desperate to be a part of the shared experience. Wanting to say yes instead of no. Wanting to share a collective moment, even if I would never see any of them again. So I ate a couple of crepes. There was also a soup that had fish in it. I ate that too. The crepes were fine. The soup was not good. For a small moment, I felt a dose of connection. It was then ambushed by the overwhelming shame. 

I hate telling this story. It pains me to share this. “It’s not about you, it's about the animals!” Year 1 vegan Merissa would say to me. That is true. It isn’t about me. But I’m still here, and I am me. And I’m feeling these things. I’m yearning for connection, love, and togetherness and I cannot seem to find it anywhere. I’m blocked by my morals and caged by my desire to harmonize with others.

Sophia Esperanza recently spoke about no longer being vegan. Many people are outraged. People I admire and respect hold up very good counterarguments to her reasonings. I don’t even agree with her choices. But I felt so much relief in knowing that others struggle too. I was vocal online about understanding her perspective. An activist who I previously looked up to called me a child. He said that I wasn’t vegan and used it to gain fame and notoriety, that I was meaningless, not even remotely a part of the community, and that my words meant nothing to anyone. It was clear I didn’t belong in the vegan world and my veganism prevented me from creating a solid community structure outside of it. 

I’d spent almost a year on the brink of insanity, having the one piece of me that I cared about the most thrown back into my face over and over again. I was labeled an extremist by others and not enough by my own. Uncertain as to how I could move forward, I decided to recoil. Choosing to be silent for a while, reconsidering everything that I thought I knew at the time. 

We live in a non-vegan world. We are the outliers trying to force a new path, and it’s not easy. I used to be the kind of vegan who regularly said “It’s so easy! It’s so easy!” whenever someone presented me with a reason why they couldn’t adopt a similar lifestyle to mine. But sometimes, it’s not that simple. Reading every ingredient label on every single thing you buy. Unable to easily order anything off a menu. With friends and partners sitting silently waiting for you to make a selection, annoyed. What we do is hard. 

“Is this brand cruelty-free?” 

“Where was this sourced?”

“Is this sugar charred from bones?”

I’m grateful for the moments of confusion. I want to question the morals I believe in and make sure they still stand tall. Even though it’s painful and somewhat embarrassing to share this story, I know that my belief in veganism is rooted in true belief and alignment, even if it is thrown back at me. I’ve had moments of “failure” and many people may find it “weak or selfish” but that’s okay. I’m not here for the approval of other vegans or non-vegans. 

It’s still a difficult space to exist in, and I still feel confused about how I fit in the world around me, but we have to question our choices to know that they’re right. In an unforgiving world…a world that tells you you're wrong no matter what decision you make, we have to have empathy for each other when we falter and question. When everything and everyone is telling you otherwise, it's okay to be uncertain, and we can’t punish each other but rather, embrace and help one other through it.