Although I had been vegetarian since 1987, it was meeting Miyoko Schinner and taking her Advanced Cheesemaking class on April 1, 2013, that turned me into a vegan. I had been carrying around some vague understanding of what the lives of dairy cows are like, but it took meeting the phenomenal vegan powerhouse Miyoko to give me the final "boot in the butt", so to say, to get me over the edge and make me happy to embrace the lifestyle. I became a dietary vegan the very next day and gradually made the "whole self" vegan transformation--a term that the wonderful Angela Crawford introduced in her book "The Vegan Transformation" many years later--over the next couple of years. I was timid to claim the label "vegan", however, as I was afraid I might unknowingly eat a non-vegan cookie or something that someone offered me and didn't tell me wasn't vegan, and someone would see me doing it which would add to all the confusion about what is and isn't vegan, and so on... I didn't want to add to that, so I didn't claim the label until 2016, when a friend of mine in the theater convinced me to "just own it!"
Moral of the story? A couple of very kind vegans helped me go vegan too--hooray for vegans changing the world, one person at a time!