Vystopia: Finding Peace, Losing Hope
I haven’t felt Vystopia this badly in years—not since I first went vegan. Lately, though, it’s like the weight of it is crushing me.
This weekend, Nigel and I went to volunteer at Millington’s Magical Barn. I’m not overstating this: it was one of the best experiences of my life. It’s one of only a small handful of times since my mum and our dog Malus died that I’ve actually felt peaceful. Peaceful, and present. Not distracting myself from thoughts of guilt or regret with TV, music, or overworking.
Despite being vegan for eight years, this was my first real in-person interaction with many of the animals we speak up for. Chickens. Turkeys. Tiny chicks who’d only just hatched.
I thought of my mum constantly. She grew up on a farm and loved the banty hens and lambs. She hated seeing the pheasants strung up on the fences. She told me how, as a child, she refused to eat rabbit (and most animal-related things), only to be beaten, starved, and mocked by my grandparents.
When the lady at the sanctuary opened a shed to reveal a mother hen with three tiny chicks, gently consuming a broken egg in a dish, I could have wept. After seven long years of activism—to see this, exactly as it should be—a hen consuming her own eggs to nourish herself and her babies, not stolen, not sold, not turned into profit. It was so profound. I wanted to tell my mum how that felt.
When we first arrived as the sanctuary, we made our way among hissing geese (my mum always told me they’d chase my uncles when they were children—so I had to laugh as they stood their ground). And as we began to help clear out a stable, a little hen approached us, curious, monitoring what we were doing, clucking back at me when I spoke to her. I beamed liek a child. My heart, which had only yesterday been strapped to a monitor, which has sat at 110 bpm at rest since my mum’s passing, slowed to a calm, normal 65.
It’s always with the animals that I find a feeling of wholeness.
In the next field, three alpacas surrounded us, and one tugged at my jumper with his teeth, while we tried to poo pick. His mischief was, yet again, simply who he was—a playful personality shining through.
In the same field, three huge cows laid peacefully and each reacted happily to affection. One lowered her head as we stroked her nose, tail flicking back and forth in quiet delight.
A sheep, clearly a good friend to the cows, as she’d been laid with them most of the morning, walked right up to me for a cuddle. She closed her eyes as I stroked her face, her whole body softening into trust. Meanwhile, the sheep who I’ve tried to connect with at the church where my mother is buried, run away in fear any time I come close to the gate. Soon, they will be gone.
Nearby, in a bed of fresh hay, an elderly pig, Truffles, whose back legs are failing him—who isn’t long for this world—lay so contentedly with his best friend. Their bodies pressed together in comfort, with a third pig slowly lowering himself to the ground to join them. A tiny family, complete in their closeness.
Even the turkey, who cautiously sidled up to his shy friend, stayed protectively by his side, as if shielding him from the world.
Each encounter was like a balm. For a few hours, the chaos inside me stilled. The jagged grief, the bitterness, the endless human noise—it all went quiet. For the first time since losing my mum, my body remembered calm.
But peace never stays. Because even as I stroked a rooster for the first time in my life, marvelling at the softness of his feathers, I couldn’t stop my mind from conjuring the image of plucked bodies being dunked into scalding electrical baths. Even as I marvelled at the tiny adorable chicks, I saw others being tossed around in factories, macerated or suffocated by the millions. Every moment of beauty was shadowed by its mirror image in the system we live in.
And the truth that cut deepest wasn’t even the slaughtermen—the men who laugh, who mock, who prolong suffering for amusement. It wasn’t the farmers tearing mothers from their babies, keeping males locked away in darkness, or how society tries its utmost to normalise it and hero-worship animal farmers each and every single day. It wasn’t even the jeering public who sneer “bacon” every time an animal’s suffering is mentioned.
It was other vegans, and how they’re trying so desperately to reshape the very definition of veganism.
The only movement animals have—the one fragile, precious space where their voices should come first—is being hijacked. Instead of protecting it, so many are tearing it apart from the inside. We’re told that veganism isn’t enough, that to count as vegan we must also champion every human cause—which, by the way, is impossible. That animal rights cannot—and absolutely shouldn’t—stand on its own.
Yesterday, in a vegan group, a pile-on began because a friend—and then I—said that animal rights must remain about animals. Not because other causes don’t matter, but because this is the only movement they have. For that, we were called bigots. Racists. Every insult you can possibly throw.
And yet—barely any one of these individuals demand that Black Lives Matter activists include veganism in their campaigns. Nobody insists that Pride attendees hold placards about animal slaughter—or, at the very least, don’t celebrate their sexuality by going out to eat sentient beings afterwards. Nobody tells those marching for Palestine that unless they’re also fighting animal farming, their cause is invalid. But for vegans, apparently, nothing is ever enough. Apparently, the animals care whether the person who paid for their suffering and death supported Israel or Palestine, or was left wing as opposed to right.
We are only roughly 2% of the UK population. Two percent. And even here, even in this small space, it still has to be made about us. It is human supremacy dressed up as progressivism.
I am exhausted. Disillusioned. Heartsick.
Because I know what I saw at that sanctuary is real—love, innocence, community, personalities that shine far brighter and kinder than most humans. And I see the exception to humanity there: the wonderful, warm-hearted people doing their utmost to make the world just that little bit better. And I so desperately wish the world had more people like that in it.
And yet, I have never felt so hopeless about humanity. It’s gotten to the point where I wonder if even doing activism is doing anything at all, when the vast majority of groups only allow attendence by activists who’ll target one particular demographic, because it’s comfortable and fitting for their wider purposes. For their “optics”.
I am so, so tired.
