Being vegan brought down my GPA
A hidden tradeoff, and the 30-second diary that exposed it
A line of students. The smell of grilled chicken. I had not eaten in five hours and my body had decided that line was the answer.
I had been calling myself a vegan since March 2024. Almost two years of not crossing the line, except for a few meals on vacation I had braced for in advance. I did not brace for the line at the Texas A&M dining hall on a Tuesday in October 2025.
My mouth was wet. There was a thin, electric thing under my ribs that I would later think of as adrenaline, but at the time was just the body deciding the next thirty seconds. I told myself, with the part of me that was still talking, that I would get the vegan plate. I got the chicken.
The eating itself was uneventful. The thing worth talking about happened in the next minute, when I noticed the gap between what I had been saying about myself for almost two years and the plate sitting in front of me.
If I hadn’t noticed that gap, I would very likely do worse in my classes. That sounds crazy, but you will understand if you keep reading. The main point is that I thought I was completely vegan, but the truth had a different shape. The rest of this essay is about that shape, and about a thirty-second writing practice that would have shown it to me five months earlier, resulting in a boost to my GPA.
That was the only time I ate meat that fall.
I want to be exact about it, because the rest of this essay depends on it. One Tuesday in October I got the chicken. Every other day from August to December I was the vegan I said I was. I packed food. I read menus. When the dining hall had nothing for me, I left campus and ate at home. By the standard I had set for myself in March 2024, the fall was a success.
It was also the semester my grades quietly dropped, and for a long time I could not have told you the two facts were connected.
Here is what I could not see. The vegan options on campus were thin and they ran out fast. Staying vegan, most days, meant leaving: taking the bus back to my apartment, eating there, and trying to work there afterward. At home my discipline for schoolwork was thinner than it was on campus. So the honest shape of almost every weekday was not “I ate vegan” against “I broke and ate chicken.” It was “I stayed vegan and went home and lost the afternoon’s work” against “I stayed on campus, kept working, and had nothing I would eat.” I picked the first one almost every time. I called it lunch. I did not call it a trade.
That is the gap I want you to feel, and it is a stranger one than the gap in the dining hall. The dining-hall gap was loud: I said vegan, I ate chicken, I noticed within a minute. This one was silent. I was doing exactly the thing I said I valued. I was being vegan. And it was costing me something else I valued, my grades, and the cost never showed up anywhere I was looking, because nothing I did on any given day looked like a failure. I had just gone home for lunch.
It is easy to catch yourself when you break a rule. It is much harder to catch yourself when you keep one and the keeping is quietly spending something else. People guard their writing time and lose the friendships the messages were for. People protect their sleep and skip the late conversation that would have mattered. They are not failing at the thing they named. They are paying for it somewhere they never check.
What I was missing had a name. I just had not put it on what was happening to me.
Two of the things I was trying to do that fall were quietly colliding, and almost every weekday one of them lost. One was staying vegan. The other was keeping my grades up: staying on campus, getting the work done, protecting everything a good GPA opens up later. Most weekdays, as the last section described, only one of them could have the afternoon.
Each of those is a telos: an end your behavior is actually working toward. Earlier essays in this series built teloi up carefully out of problems and the poles they aim at; here the plain version is enough. A telos is just one of the ends your weeks keep bending toward, whether or not you have ever said it out loud, and you are running many at once: staying fed, staying liked, finishing the degree. Most of the time they fit together and you never have to rank them. Two whole life-directions tearing apart at once would be a telos conflict in the largest sense. What I had that fall was the smaller, far more common kind: two particular ends needing the same hour, with room for one. That is a sub-telos conflict, and it is the unit worth watching, because it happens to you constantly and almost never makes a scene.
Aspirations are what you want to want. “I am a vegan” was one of mine, and a real one. But what you say you want stops being the evidence the moment two teloi need the same hour and only one can have it. What you do becomes the evidence instead. I would have told you, that fall, that my grades came first. My afternoons said otherwise: the vegan telos kept taking them, and my grades were what paid. The gap between the ranking I would have claimed and the ranking my weekdays actually enacted is what a sub-telos conflict shows you about yourself. Saying which end matters most costs nothing. What you do when two of them collide is the honest record, and mine had been sitting in my fall schedule the whole time.
I saw all of this on January 13, 2026, the second day of the spring semester, and I bought the bigger dining plan that same afternoon. The plan let me stay on campus through the day, which is to say it let the academic sub-telos start keeping the hours the vegan one had quietly been taking all fall. It cost more. I had been paying the other price, the one that did not show up on a bill, since August.
I want to be honest about the other half of it, because that half is less flattering. Protecting my grades was the main reason I bought the plan, but it was not the only reason. I was also drawn to the food, and having a campus plan meant I no longer had to deny that completely. I stayed vegan most days, the way I had since March 2024 and still do; the plan did not end that. What it ended was the all-or-nothing edge of the rule, the strict version that the October slip had already shown was thinner than I kept insisting it was. My grades handed me a clean reason to loosen that edge a little, and the part of me that had wanted the chicken in October was glad to take it. Naming the conflict is what let me see both halves at once: the cost I had been paying without noticing, and the small loosening I had been wanting anyway. The only thing I could not do that fall was see either one while it was happening.
Here is the practice.
The next time you notice that you just picked between two sub-teloi, when something tugging at you lost to something else tugging at you and an hour or an afternoon came down on one side, write three lines somewhere. A notes app, a pocket notebook, the back of a receipt. Name the two sub-teloi in plain words. Write what you actually did. Write what the choice suggests was carrying the weight.
You write an entry because you noticed the choice, not because the choice was important. A canceled call counts. A skipped exercise session counts. The half-hour of television that was supposed to last only the meal but lasted the meal and an episode after counts too, even though it never felt like a choice. Automatic moves belong in the diary. So does the opposite case, the rule you keep faithfully while it quietly spends something else, the way staying vegan kept costing me afternoons I never thought to write down. The moves with the most signal are the ones that never looked like failures, because those are the ones you have the least reason to examine.
A single entry is real evidence. Do not dismiss it. But trust it less than you trust a pattern. Entries made each in the actual moment of scarcity, rather than in a quiet Sunday hour where everything sounds reasonable, are the part of the diary that earns the most weight. One entry tells you what a single Tuesday looked like. Ten of them tell you which sub-telos was running the autumn.
That last part is the hard part, and it is the part I would have gotten wrong. If I had started this diary in September of 2025, the fall entries would not have come easily, because going home for lunch never felt like a decision I was making. It felt like nothing. But that is exactly the move the practice tells you to write down anyway: the one that looks like nothing. Forced onto the page every few days, it would have read the same way each time: the dining hall had nothing for me, so I went home to stay vegan, and the afternoon’s work did not happen. By mid-October the line would have repeated enough to stop looking like nothing. By November I would have seen the ranking and bought the dining plan then, instead of letting two more months of GPA go to a trade I had not admitted I was making.
This is the flip side of the framing from prior essays on bad habits. There, a habit you wish you did not have turns out to be working for some sub-telos. Here it is the same machinery from the other direction: a commitment you are proud of can be quietly working against one. Either way the sub-telos is doing the deciding, and either way the diary is what makes it visible. Start one this week. Wait for the next time two things want the same hour, and write down which one took it. You were already choosing. The diary is only what lets you finally watch yourself do it.
Written with the help of AI