u/Kwokin

I’m posting the first of the responses here. If you fancy adding your voice to this project, please do get in touch. My sincere hope is that every bit helps.🙏

About ten years ago I stood in a crowd after a Surge rally in London listening to Ed Winters (Earthling Ed). One thing he said has always stayed with me: do whatever you can.
I’ve never been the activist who’s going to chain myself to a gate, investigate farms or stand in the street persuading strangers. That’s just not me. But my partner and I decided we could do something in our own way, so we started a small vegan blog.
We never made any money from it, and that was never the point. We just wanted to add another voice. We reviewed restaurants, interviewed vegan businesses and vegan doctors, wrote articles about issues affecting the vegan community, and ran a series called Everyday Vegans, where ordinary people shared why they went vegan, what changed their minds, and what life has been like since.
Two years ago my partner died. I’ve kept the blog going because it means a great deal to me, but if I’m honest it’s become mostly restaurant reviews. There’s nothing wrong with that, but I know it could be more.
So this is an open invitation.
If you’ve got something to say, I’d love to give you a place to say it.
If you fancy being an Everyday Vegan, please get in touch. If you’ve uncovered an injustice that deserves more attention and can write about it, get in touch. If you’ve found something hopeful or beautiful that deserves celebrating, get in touch. Whether it’s 300 words or 3,000, I’d love to hear from you.
The blog is small. It doesn’t make any money – of course it doesn’t and it never will. But it does reach people. And maybe that’s enough. Maybe, like Ed said all those years ago, this is just one more way of doing whatever we can.

You’ve got to get through this your own way, and there are some people who can point you in a positive direction, but with the best will in the world very often people can’t.
I couldn’t live in my house the year after my husband died. I spent the odd night there after awhile. But it was my safe space, and then it became a place, frankly, of horror when he died suddenly and unexpectedly there. Lots of people had opinions about this. Could I try this, could I try that…
But as the second anniversary approaches I’ve been thinking a lot about possessions, his possessions. Honestly, I haven’t been able to have them anywhere near me. In the week after he died, a kindly thinking neighbour sent me a framed photo of the two of us, and I immediately locked it in a drawer that I never looked at, for example. The things that were supposed to comfort me, at first filled me with horror, and then just deep and utter sadness. I’m sad, but I have to go on.
So I’m now in a new house, in a new city, with family nearby. And I want to write something that reflects how I feel, because surely I can’t be the only one. Possessions, now artefacts to a degree, don’t comfort me. Am I the only one? I’d really welcome any thoughts on this.