If I had said, “I must write the perfect novel; my prose must be as shiveringly gorgeous as Angela Carter’s, my world-building as visionary as Octavia Butler’s,” then I’d turn into that character in The Plague by Albert Camus, who pens the opening paragraph of his magnum opus and spends the rest of his life fussing over it. People like Henry Brougham see the imperfect mess of real-world living as a convenient escape hatch: there’s no dodging hypocrisy, so it doesn’t matter if we engage in the avoidable forms. The person who lives his life by this line of thinking most likely won’t ever recognize its destructiveness—not even on the day he finds he can’t lift himself out of his favorite armchair, his feet swollen and purple with gout and his arteries hardened to caulk.
There’s always been a great deal of avoidable harm in the arts too: the living animal body transformed into a glassy-eyed unmoving copy of itself, a delicate design etched into the tooth enamel of the sperm whale, the ivory tusk fashioned into piano keys. Scrimshaw and taxidermy have long since fallen out of fashion for ethical reasons, but there’s plenty more that’s not so obvious: the mink and camel hair in our paintbrushes, the glue made from marrow, the ink from bone char, the ox gall in the box of watercolors. All the trees felled to bear our words or the tubes of dried-up acrylic paint destined for the landfill. We don’t like to linger on how much destruction has to happen to make our creative pursuits possible, but why destroy more than we have to?
The justifications for continuing to eat and use animals seem to parallel the justifications I hear for why they’re not following through on the art they once seemed so eager to make. “I’m not good enough.” “This is just the way I’m built.” “I could never do what you do.” I feel saddened and frustrated by their defeatism—which is, in essence, not much more than egotistical problem seeking. They look at me and see the straight man who wouldn’t lay a finger on somebody else’s exceptionally pretty wife in seven whole years of solitude, a person who orders carrot juice for lunch. If the standard is impossible, it’s much easier to let themselves off the hook.
As counterintuitive as it may seem at first, going vegan has made me less of a perfectionist. Much of this mellowing out has to do with what I call “ego management.” No one ever enjoys realizing they’re wrong, that they’ve been laboring under a misapprehension, and so, this lifestyle has helped to crystallize a fundamental truth for me: that I can’t truly grow before owning up to my flaws.
I understand now that my skills are best put to use in advocating for those who cannot speak for themselves, at least not in any human language. Even when I’m writing fiction that seemingly has nothing to do with animal rights, I keep in mind something Plath once wrote, that “perfection is terrible, it cannot have children.” A fertile mind is an intricate tapestry of contradictions and desires that are, as Brougham put it, “lamentably incongruous and motley.” But perhaps our consistency lies in always aiming to do better.
Go On, Ask for the Carrot Juice
Think of a person for whom you feel an intense admiration, someone you’ve always wanted to be more like. Maybe they devote much of their free time to an important cause, or they’re amazingly productive and fulfilled in their work, or they just seem so darn happy all—the—time.
If you actually know this person, take a deep breath and ask if you can speak to them candidly for a few minutes. Tell them how highly you regard them and ask if they have any advice to offer you. If this person is a celebrity or someone else you can only observe at a distance, spend some time searching online for any interviews they’ve done or pieces they’ve written about their background, beliefs, and motivations.
Either way, the chances are exceedingly high that this person you revere isn’t some kind of superhero who lives up to impossible standards—that the qualities you most admire in them are qualities you can cultivate in yourself.
© Marinksy, Tale, watercolor and acrylic, 2016.
Lighting the Lamps in the Mind and Heart
Sticking point #4: “I hyper-caffeinate to fend off chronic lethargy. Even when there’s time to create, I don’t always feel mentally or emotionally up to it.”
Google “creativity” and “diet” and you’ll find a series of articles promising optimal brain performance if you eat from their recommended list of “superfoods.” All kinds of berries. Nuts and seeds. Whole grains like oats, quinoa, barley, and amaranth. Avocados. “Sulforaphane for the brain,” as raw-food coach Karen Ranzi says: cruciferous greens like broccoli, kale, brussels sprouts, and spinach. Cauliflower and broccoli sprouts are especially rich in this cognition-boosting (and cancer-fighting) phytochemical.
The only animal foods nutritionists ever seem to recommend for brain health are eggs and salmon (or cold-water fish in general). When I was a kid, my father often quoted a doctor on the radio who asserted that eggs are “nature’s perfect food,” but clinical researcher and professor of medicine Dr. Neal Barnard has since dubbed them “the incredibly inedible egg,” noting that one egg has as much cholesterol as a Big Mac. Eggs make the list only because they’re high in choline, a vitamin essential for brain and liver health, but you can get adequate doses of choline from collards, broccoli, cauliflower, brussels sprouts, asparagus, tofu, quinoa, and other plant sources instead.
As for salmon, the fish flesh you purchase at the supermarket most likely comes from intensive-confinement farming operations in which the poor creatures are forced to swim in their own feces. The types of omega-3s for which fish consumption is touted—DHA and EPA—actually come from the algae the fishes eat, and the human body converts a certain amount of ALA to DHA and EPA. So even if we’re not sure we’re getting all the omega-3 fatty acids we need from ALA-rich walnuts, flax, leafy greens, and other land sources, we can use algae supplements for DHA and EPA instead of fish oil, which tends to go rancid (and may be tainted with mercury).
Scientists have found that a traditional Mediterranean diet—high in vegetables, fruit, beans, and nuts—may lower your risk of Alzheimer’s and cognitive decline in general. “When researchers tried to tease out the protective components, fish consumption showed no benefit, neither did moderate alcohol consumption,” writes Dr. Michael Greger, a medical doctor who specializes in clinical nutrition. “The two critical pieces appeared to be vegetable consumption, and the ratio between unsaturated fats and saturated fats, essentially plant fats to animal fats.” Greger recommends a vegan diet in bestselling books like How Not to Die.V
When you live by the standard Western diet—with super-high cholesterol and saturated fat from red meat, poultry, eggs, and dairy—all that gunk has to go somewhere, so over time it turns into plugs in your arteries and plaque in your brain. The effect is the same even if you consume these foods in moderation. So, if you want to keep coming up with brilliant ideas well into your golden years, quitting animal products is the best decision you can make. Mind you, I am not a nutritionist, but I have been vegan for seven years now and my thinking has never been clearer.
Kerry Lemon, a very talented and prolific illustrator from the UK, reports the same since going vegan four years ago, and she also experienced a more consistent energy level. “I no longer have the three o’clock slump, and heavy feeling after meals,” she wrote me. “I used to have to plan creative activities for the mornings when I was at my best but am now able to work creatively at any time.” Artist and vegan lifestyle coach Vicki Brett-Gach concurs: “I have more creative energy (and feel it more consistently) than I had before I was vegan…now, I practically bounce out of bed in the morning and cannot wait to dive into my creative