The Girl I Finally Let In: How Personal Narrative Sets the Stage for Powerful Animal Rights Activism

Jasmin Singer, cofounder of Our Hen House and Senior Features Editor for VegNews

Stella was the type of beauty you rarely see. It’s possible that her jet-black hair and gold-flecked green eyes were the most captivating part of her striking look, but it was really the intensity of her expression that made curious onlookers unable to turn away. When she showed up at my door, I was startled both by her fragility and her inability to look at me. Though I’d soon start to see fierceness in this small wonder, the day she came to live with me, I almost couldn’t handle how wilted she appeared. I acted unflappable anyway, even though on the inside I had no idea how on earth I would be capable of caring for someone who had been left on the streets to fend for herself. How did she wind up with me, of all people?

On that autumnal afternoon when Stella came into my life like a quiet yet unrelenting storm, the timing couldn’t have been worse: I was newly separated from my spouse, and still very heartbroken—so much so that I had moved across the country in an attempt to escape my former life. The perplexing, aging-hippie beach town of Santa Cruz, California—ripe with billowing palm trees, cool ocean breezes, and a rampant homeless population—was where I somehow landed, a far cry from the bustling streets of Manhattan, where I had pounded the pavement for seventeen electric years. On a purely logistical level, it was work that took me to the easy-breezy Central California coast, but it was also that work—managing the editorial team for a thriving vegan food magazine—that I had specifically sought out as a means to starting new. Running away, it turns out, is overrated.

Maybe it was this complete reframing of reality that gave me the idea that taking in Stella would somehow be okay. I was starting fresh and acting the part, so why not act the part of someone who could let in this little lost soul? The harried representatives from the foster agency didn’t realize just how small my apartment was, and when they arrived with Stella, I could tell by their expressions that they were miffed. Even Stella seemed to register a bit of disappointment, clearly not prepared for living in a studio apartment with virtually no privacy and nowhere to hide. Still, we forged on, and those first few days were painful. At night, I would regularly hear sweet Stella cry for her babies, from whom she had just been separated, mere days before arriving. Other than those after-dark weeping sessions, she barely made a noise, keeping very much to herself even when I tried to relate to her with shared activities and meals. The agency assured me this kind of behavior was normal, but it felt almost too hard to bear. What she had seen in her short life on the streets of Santa Cruz would, I’m sure, be more traumatic than I’d ever experience.

As time went on, Stella and I grew to find a friendly enough rapport. She was still extremely guarded, but she became more and more curious sitting beside me, usually in silence, each of us lost in our own vastly different worlds of heartbreak and trying as best we could to put it all back together. Though Stella had been so thin and malnourished at the time she came to me, I started to notice with secret relief that she had begun to eat more, putting on a few desperately needed pounds so she could regain her strength. The agency was thrilled, saying we were a good match for each other, after all. This sentiment moved me more than I expected, and the knot in my stomach that I’d had since she arrived loosened a little. But Stella was only meant to stay with me for a short period, so I tried my best not to get too attached to this fierce young beauty who was starting to find a home in my heart. The agency started badgering me for updated info; they needed it for her records so she could be placed in a permanent home. I found myself conveniently ignoring their emails, and later, their phone calls. Stella had made my home hers, and though I maintained the line that I was in no shape to keep this up, I seemed to refuse to let the system work, repeatedly ignoring their requests.

As the months passed, Stella was, in fact, beginning to thrive. She was engaging more, instigating contact, expressing herself when she needed something instead of bottling it inside. She no longer cried at night, though she did remain awake for much of the dark hours. Admittedly, so did I. The agency managed to track me down, and the day finally came when I was to pass her along to her next family. I needed to keep reminding myself that I was just a stop along her way. I told myself that I refused to let this goodbye be emotional, even though defiant tears would regularly form at the corner of my stoic eyes anyway, just at the thought of letting her go.

And when that inevitable day arrived—just one day before my thirty-seventh birthday—I suddenly decided to change the course of our lives, Stella and mine. With a determination so strong that I didn’t have time to talk myself out of it, I picked up my phone, dialed the numbers stuck to my fridge, and immediately got Stella’s caseworker on the line. “It’s Jasmin,” I said nervously. “I’m calling about Stella.” There was silence. “I think I want to start the process of adopting her,” I continued, no longer shocked by the words coming out of my mouth—realizing at once they were the realest I’d uttered since moving to this sleepy town where I didn’t quite belong and absolutely never would. “Yes, I want to keep her,” I repeated, more firmly this time. “I want Stella to officially be my cat, and . . . I want to be her human.”

I have long thought it strange that the animal rights movement hasn’t really latched on to personal narrative as a means of creating change, as readily as other social justice movements—from the LGBTQ movement to the fight against racism. By the time my memoir—Always Too Much and Never Enough—was released in 2016, I had already discovered the magical powers of storytelling. I had spent my career up until then advocating for animals through a variety of means: everything from leafleting in NYC’s Union Square, to organizing weekly protests against foie gras, to writing gut-punching exposés detailing egregiously cruel (yet flinchingly standard) animal agriculture practices.

Finding myself frustrated by the commonly held belief that we must wait for top-down, organizational campaigns to latch on to in order to change the world for animals, in January of 2010 I cofounding a media nonprofit, Our Hen House, with the goal of providing thoughtful podcasts and other media outlets for anyone who wanted a place to explore various ways to become activists. Our Hen House quickly evolved to become a community for people who wanted to get involved with animal rights activism, but had no idea where or how to start.

The guests that my cohost, Mariann Sullivan, and I interviewed became the portals for thousands of inroads to change-making. It took me some time, but I finally understood the reason why OHH became successful: it was not only providing ideas, but the guests themselves were telling their stories. This was my first foray into personal narrative and storytelling as a means to moving the needle. I have learned that a person’s lasting impression is rarely the information they disseminate; rather, it’s how that person made us feel. It’s the stories people tell that become memorable, not the facts spouted out.

Nothing taught me this more acutely than the process of going on a sixty-city book tour with my book. From Tucson to Philly, San Francisco to Kansas City, I told my story of becoming vegan to auditoriums full of people who actually wanted to be there. Unlike when I was leafleting and people would hold their hands in front of their faces because they didn’t want a vegan telling them why they needed to throw out all of the food in their fridge and rethink their worldview, the folks at my talks remained, for the most part, rapt. They had opted in.

I stood at the front of the room and told them about my journey with food, starting as a chubby kid following around my thin mom from weight-loss program to weight-loss program, finding solace only in a box of cheese crackers. This journey led me to a food addiction so profound that it took me decades to understand, and in many ways, I still am unpacking it.

Food took on an entirely new meaning when, at twenty-four years old, I blindly took a first date to see a documentary about animal agriculture, having my mind blown as I reexamined my feminism through the lens of the eggs and dairy I consumed during every single meal. I sat there watching the movie while my leg shook so frantically that the person next to me had to gently ask me to stop. I looked up at the screen, and in front of my eyes, families were being torn apart. I thought of my own broken home as a child, and I could barely hold myself together.

The adrenaline shot through me, and I didn’t know where to put it; at one point I jolted into a standing position in sheer horror because of what I was seeing: how could I not have known? The female animals on the screen were essentially being exploited for their reproductive parts, much like I had been years prior when I was date-raped in a scene so painful that I can’t linger on the memories for long, even now, twenty years later. Plus, I fancied myself a feminist, so how did this new-to-me information stack up against what I ate for lunch?

Stories like that one—and how, when I went vegan, I began to redefine food as something I stood for, no longer against—filled the pages of my book, and I filled living rooms and bookshops and universities with these stories during my colossal tour of the United States. Simply by talking about my own journey with food and veganism, I in turn emboldened people to look at their own such journeys in a new way. And time and time again, these people went vegan and did not turn back.

When I wasn’t writing, I was acting. I grew up doing a lot of theater, and I found safety and comfort in the “fourth wall,” theater-talk for the invisible wall that exists between actors in a play and the audience. Not only did I find safety from the fourth wall, but so did the onlookers. There is something very calming and entrancing about learning life lessons by way of characters on a stage in front of you. It has the exact opposite effect of proselytizing. If you’re a vegan, chances are, you’ve heard this word before. Animal activists are often accused of lecturing to others, though many of us think we’re simply sharing something deeply important about the treatment of animals behind closed doors. The inherent issue there, of course, is that most people don’t want to hear the truth about animals, because associated with that truth is an implicit judgment (real or perceived) of their own behavior, so their defenses go right up. That’s one of the reasons why genuine humility is such a deeply important part of advocacy and of communication in general. And yet, when you’re in the audience of a play, or you’re reading a book, or you’re on the other end of someone who is sharing with you a vulnerable story, you are much less likely to feel lectured to. Proselytizing seems to go out the window; onlookers tend to no longer feel judged. They are witnesses, not students who didn’t ask for a lesson. They are in it with you.

Personal narrative is powerful stuff. Finding our truths and telling our stories is a paramount way of eliciting change—starting with ourselves, and then extending outward to anyone who comes into contact with our words. Like theater, and much like the arts in general, telling our stories is a safe, nonjudgmental, humble way to talk about what is happening to animals and to magically and purposefully begin a revolution. Social change will not happen without our stories, and our stories cannot be fully realized without social change. The reason my book resonated with the audiences at those venues where I shared my most personal moments—knowing their interpretations of my experiences was entirely a reflection of them and not me—was because I am extremely ordinary. My story of being “always too much and never enough” is, in fact, universal. We each struggle with versions of the same demons. And we each want to do better at being ourselves. I found that as I became relentlessly discerning about my own choices and motivations, veganism was a natural evolution. Not only can personal narrative change the world, but it might actually be the only thing that can. We just have to tell our story to somebody who wants to listen, and the rest of the story will simply unfold.

As it turns out, Stella and I are indeed a perfect pair, bringing out the best in one another through roundabout ways. She’s almost inevitably her neediest when I am my grumpiest, and her reliance on me for food and other necessities has brought me out of some dark moments. Though I don’t speak cat, my guess is that the same could be said of her. Stella came from a traumatic past, so her inclinations toward trust are often murky, and yet I remain present and loyal, reaching out my hand only when she lets me and allowing my reassurance to extend to her with the unrelenting-yet-focused determination that only two survivors brought together against all odds would be able to understand. If you have a companion animal, my suspicion is that you know exactly what I’m talking about. That kind of quiet connection is, I think, the true definition of love, and the arbitrary separation of species is irrelevant when it comes to this kind of life-changing companionship.

Though my relationship with Stella thrives when she and I are simply keeping each other company—nowadays in our new apartment in Los Angeles (which has proven to be a phenomenal move for each of us), it is my narrative about our relationship, not the relationship itself, that is key to social change. Social change has the opportunity to take place when we give voice to the voiceless and hold space for their stories, as well as our own. It’s about crafting words from a revolutionary moment that would otherwise pass by, adding tangibility to a valuable and pivotal perspective: ours. Believing ourselves, trusting our perception, and writing it down also means that we are giving others the opportunity to connect with the universal themes that oftentimes make us feel so completely alone. Writing down our stories is indeed a political act that can inform communities, allow space for marginalized groups, and ultimately elicit change.

I told Stella’s story because it is one that deserves to be told. Her bravery against all odds, the intrepid ways she allowed herself to trust again, and the hope that can be gleaned by how authentically and relentlessly she moved through her grief and came out whole is something we can all stand to learn from. That, in itself, is enough inspiration for a lifetime, but add to that the value of personifying animals as a reminder of their sentience and magnificence—and the moral imperative of adopting these family members—and I know that I’ve done my job.

Stella does not speak for all cats, of course, but the commonality of her story can speak for many. My hope is that someone will hear it and shift, just a little bit more, toward compassion for others—the ones we too readily cast aside. The second we silence ourselves, we might actually be silencing a movement. The solution is to continue to find our truths and tell our stories.