Who is going to slow down time again?
What a foolish question, even I, the one who is asking, know that it is a foolish thing to ask for. When has time ever been still? In what world has time ever indulged one by standing still, even just for a moment?
At one point, perhaps in the very early days of this pandemic, I imagined a slowing down of the world by this monster. I was dead wrong.
Because of all the things that have either been broken and/or stalled by this, most of us are all now stuck in planning and developmental stages as a way to prepare for when the world can fully be up and running again. We are chasing our own tails and caught in a different type of rat race.
Do you know what I miss? That lull we all experienced when the pandemic started, when flour and yeast became a thing you needed to drive to several shops for before you could find it. When we were all collectively making magwinya, madombolo and banana bread.
When oxtail was one of the most shared recipes of that time.
What became abundantly clear is at that traumatic moment, people turned to the one thing whose comfort was known, dependable and solid, — food.
Some then very quickly realised what was happening and, luckily, had the ability and mental strength to get back into more healthier routines. And despite those resumed routines, one cannot take back what the initial response to what is a global traumatic event was, — food.
For years now, science has been saying that some people who battle obesity have arrived at that point because of trauma. And for years now, simpletons have insisted that it is because fat people are gluttonous slobs that they are the way they are.
Despite our constant attempts at trying to make it so, life isn’t neat, for any of us. Most of us carry a brokenness in one way or another, we are all fighting something. The sin of fat people is that they carry their brokenness on the outside. For fat people, the untidiness lives in a place they have to confront daily, their bodies, the very vehicles through which they are meant to navigate life is their "untidy". The misfortune of carrying your untidy on the outside, the curse of your body being an open invitation to unsolicited advice and debates.
The way in which obesity is discussed and treated reveals each day how ugly society and its medical practitioners are. Why would you want to shame a situation whose origin you do not know or understand?
What has gone so wrong in your own life that you would need to remind someone of their brokenness in the awful way that society does?
This is why I want someone to stop time. To allow people the opportunity to reflect and heal their own brokenness and fix that instead of trying to "fix" fat people.
I need for time to stand still for the medical practitioners who have taken an oath to save lives, but attack fat people from a place of ridicule instead of healing.
“We just want them to be healthier.” No, you want them to be healthier at your prompt, you want to solve them.Nowhere here have I said that obesity is healthy and as someone who battles weight issues, I know more than most smaller people what my body means.Yes, obesity is a problem, but however large fat bodies might be, they are no playground for your ‘holier than thou’ imagined superiority.
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