Janine Agombar

This whole quarantine situation is a funny old thing isn't it? I don't mean funny ha ha, I mean funny strange.

For those of you who don’t know, I am in the latter stages of training to become a counsellor. I’ve been at this for about two-and-a-half years now and still have another fourteen or so months to go until I am officially qualified.

Dear Younger Me,

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about guilt and how it can be both a positive and negative emotion. That guilty feeling we get in the pit of our stomachs is there to let us know when our actions are not aligned with what we perceive to be right.

Two and a half years ago, I transitioned to a Vegan lifestyle after being vegetarian for 28 years and it was something I’d wanted to do for a while but never thought I could. I had absolutely no understanding of what a Vegan diet looked like. I always thought it seemed so ‘extreme.’ I had already omitted meat and fish from my diet and I wondered if I took dairy away, what would be left? How would I survive on a few vegetables?

Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock lately, you will more than likely have seen Iceland’s advertisement regarding palm oil circulating across social media. It’s so great that this has been brought forward into public consciousness at long last. After all, this is not a new issue. It’s been a thing for years. But now thanks to Iceland, people are finally talking about the deforestation and unnecessary suffering and killing of orangutans and other animals all in the name of palm oil—which is used in so many every day products.