We need a kinder vegan movement

This is me with my beloved Isis. I believe I was 22 in this photo. We formalised the adoption and my friend Lorena took a few photos of us strolling around Madrid Río.

Next December, on Christmas Eve, I turn 37, that'll be 19 years without eating animals. Although I'd always rescued little animals when I was a child and stopped eating seafood when I saw a crab fighting for their life when I was five. The first time I collected some signatures to end bullfighting I was only 15. I printed a few sheets on my dad's home office printer and took it to class, ready to end injustice. I was still at a religious school and some of my classmates, all girls, laughed in my face. The envelope was sent to this animal rights organisation that no longer exists in Spain. I paid for the stamps with the teaching money I earned, and stole the envelope from dad's office.

Since I was 18 I've been doing activism consistently despite suffering (with Isis) from great precarity over the six years I worked for an animal sanctuary, the burnout I still deal with; having suffered bullying from fellow vegans on several occasions and having to deal with being an LGTBQ person in a religious family. I did not even quit when Isis got diagnosed with a brutal cancer that took her away from me.

Despite it all. I still do it. Because even though this is part of who I am and why I do what I do, it is not for me. This is for them. It always has, it always will be.

I've chosen my career in BA because I like the Effective Altruism approach. Then my masters' in communication. Joined the debate club too. All of it because I've always had the same question in mind: "how can I defend animals better?."

So, when yesterday I had to make the hard decision to end my podcast where I interview vegetarian and vegan women who are changing the world, I did not do so lightly. Yesterday I also announced that I would stop the free weekly newsletter about communication and veganism I've been sending weekly since 2015 for people to keep learning. There's simply no money, no financing for women's projects other than those in food tech, or other scalable vegan businesses.

Just so you know, I haven’t had a job that wasn’t related to veganism other than brief gigs teaching to support myself throughout my entire adult life. This is what I do, nothing else. So I give it a lot of thought.

I’m telling my story too because I had to deal with a nasty message the other day at The Vegan Agency Instagram from, surprisingly, someone who works at another vegan agency asking me why our tagline is "not just for vegans". To which I replied that we believe veganism is for everybody, not just vegans.

She ended with a sentence that has gotten me thinking since I was a teenager writing essays about Anita Roddick, founder of The Body Shop, at Business School: "How is it that humans find a way to make everything about themselves...". I know, right? This is the very reason I went vegan in the first place, because we don't see them as they are and we feel entitled to exploit them.

This is no strange feeling to me. I have been shamed, ridiculised and insulted no matter the strategy I've used to defend animals. Yes, by other vegans, mainly mansplaining to me what the vegan movement is all about (let me roll my eyes here), but a few women, too.?

You see, the thing is, that this is indeed a movement on behalf of others' well-being, but we, as the animals we are too, are part of it. We also matter. It's called intersectionality (let the gods bless Kimberlé Crenshaw for giving birth to such a beautiful term). The way we speak to each other matters too.

We do need, urgently, a kinder vegan movement. We are exhausting, discouraging and scaring people away and hurting each other along the way. Other vegans aren’t the enemy, things are already hard enough, we don’t need to be at each other’s throats.?

Of course, I know I'm far from perfect but I do strive to be the person my late dog Isis thought I was. That Paula, no-one else. So, yes, after years of being silent about these things, I'm no longer taking sh^t from anyone because we have a ton of work to do and the clock is ticking for us to leave a better world to everyone, not just the other animals.

That means, to me, pivot as many times as I need to, leave projects that I adore with all of my heart just because my mental health, and my pocket, can't sustain them anymore, and keep communication, animals and you, lovely lot, at the core of my heart, where I keep all the things that truly matter to me.

As Anne Lamott put it: “You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.”