On my 25 th birthday, I woke up and had my regular breakfast of scrambled eggs and bacon. While chewing on the bacon I had a realization. “I actually don’t like this,” I thought to myself, while the bacon was being masticated in my mouth. “You know what, I actually don’t like meat and poultry,” I said to myself, after swallowing the chewed-off meat. And this is when I turned to vegetarianism. No one forced me, no one advocated it, no one suggested it. “Being a vegetarian was solely my choice.” It was a unanimous choice by my body and my mind. My body craved healthier foods while my mind kept telling me that eating animals was unfair. My biggest problem was that I knew nothing about vegetarianism. I never thought about the nutrients I got and the possible deficiencies I could have.   This was the when I first realized how clueless about food I was . I believed in myths that never existed. “It’s impossible to survive without meat,” everyone I knew would say. “Vegetarians suffered from malnutrition and have lower energy than meat lovers,” people close to me said. “It’s expensive and the meat cravings are unbearable,” my family said to me.

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I was sucked into what we loosely call depression. It’s a catch phrase for a range of conditions and illnesses that can be caused by as many kinds of reasons. In the early stages of depression, I sought out advice from friends and close family. “Stop overthinking,” they said. But, their advice would irritate me. “They just don’t get it,” I felt. I had lost my father in my twenties but losing my mother in my thirties hit twice as hard, because that’s when I realized both of them were now no more. I was working hard to be successful but the great recession had just hit, my wife had just had our second child and our first child was just about turning ten. And for no apparent reason, a few months after my mother’s death I felt a cloud gradually gather around me, one that wouldn’t lift no matter what I tried. My wife was close to delivering our second child. At the time, I was just about scraping through and our company announced a retrenchment exercise. I had not yet been fired, but the uncertainty was enough to tip me over. And it was only after my wife delivered that I told her I wanted to get help.