I went vegan because of TikTok, which still surprises me to this very day. About four and a half years ago, I kept coming across That Vegan Teacher. People loved to mock her, and honestly… I first watched her purely for entertainment. She was chaotic, funny, always singing these little songs, and I would literally watch her videos while eating chicken. I wasn’t anti-vegan, I just kept the idea somewhere in the back of my mind. But she kept mentioning http://dontwatch.org/ And one night, out of boredom, I clicked. Six minutes. That’s all it took for the ground under my feet to shift. At first, I thought, “Surely this only happens in certain countries… not everywhere.” I grew up in a Muslim environment where seeing animals slaughtered during religious festivals was normal, and as a kid I didn’t question it. But watching that footage as an adult, with no rituals, no context, just the raw reality of suffering, cracked something open in me. A part of me I didn’t even know was numb suddenly woke up. And then I did what many people do: I went looking for excuses not to change. I kept watching more of That Vegan Teacher’s videos, hoping she’d say something ridiculous enough that I could dismiss the whole thing (I know this is so so silly haha). But instead, I fell straight down the rabbit hole. I watched longer documentaries. I argued with strangers online. Every conversation, every documentary, every horrifying fact pushed me closer to fully going vegan, and it took about a month for me to make the shift. I’m based in Bali now. I work at an animal advocacy organization (supporting grassroots activism, public education, and capacity-building across Southeast Asia) and I’m exploring new ways to expand this work. Sometimes I still think about the version of me eating chicken while scrolling TikTok, laughing at silly songs, having no idea that my entire life was about to reroute.