I love reading, I think I always have. I remember reading books aloud to my stuffed animals, shushing them repeatedly to make sure they were all paying attention (I didn’t want them to miss the good parts of the latest Little Critter adventure).

In high school, I learned that I didn’t like being told which books to read, so oftentimes I didn’t. Since then, I’ve read a handful of the books I was assigned in high school, and a couple of them have stuck with me The Great Gatsby, to name one. Reading, to me, opens up entirely new worlds. Worlds that exist between a front and back cover.

When I moved to New York City, I started to read more and more books, as I didn’t have a TV in my bedroom (I didn’t want to spend money on cable that could be spent on Ramen noodles and SpaghettiOs). When I moved, there was no way to know that I would be vegan by March of the following year, and there was no way to know that one of those many books I read would make me incredibly grateful for my decision to become vegan.

The Awareness by Gene Stone and Jon Doyle is a book that I finished in five days. It’s a book that made me think and look at the world through a new lens, through the lens of someone who understood animals in a new way. Let me explain: The Awareness is a fictional story of animals, focusing on a bear, an elephant (named Nancy), a pig (named 323) and a dog (named Cooper) who gain human-like awareness, they can think and interpret and talk, just like us. These four animals become aware of the actions taken against them by human beings, actions that we all know occur, whether that be the inhumane conditions of factory farms or the abuse by the hands of humankind. These four main animals decide, throughout the course of the book, whether they will fight to kill the humans in a revolution, or if they will stand down and refuse to have any more bloodshed. In a turn of events, in a very non-human way, a number of the animals refuse to fight. The animals decide that killing other living beings is not a way to live, it is not a way that anyone should live.

I am not better than anyone because I have decided to remove meat, dairy and eggs from my diet. People are going to eat meat, people are going to drink milk and eat eggs. I am not naive enough to believe that that will change anytime soon. But what I want is for those meat eaters to register the fact that animals are not simply here for our use or for our entertainment. I want the meat eaters to realize that the animals we use for our own benefit have the capacity to feel what is done to them. Take the example of the orca mother who has her baby taken away from her and goes through the stages of grief. Take the piglets in factory farms who have their tails cut off while fully awake and cry through the pain. Or take the rhinos who shed tears while his or her horn is cut off.

I am not better than anyone else, I don’t pretend to be. But the heartbreak I feel for the animals we seem to have no regard for is heartbreak that doesn’t seem to be shared. According to Peta, being a vegan saves 198 animals a year. 198.

So far I have saved 28 animals. I am not better than anyone else.

I am aware.