there's been a new rhetoric around the pandemic regarding younger people being hospitalized now, and that is why we should be caring about the variants/following protocols/not mouth breathing on strangers in grocery stores. to be honest, i find this disturbing.

so much of the pandemic has been framing elderly, disabled, chronically ill, and fat people as disposable. if you're just now, taking this virus seriously because younger able bodied people are now being hospitalized, you need to take several moments of reflection.

from day one, this virus should have been horrifying to you because it disproportionately was and still is killing one part of the population (at the time, elderly people and people with underlying health conditions). these are humans.

one thing this entire pandemic has highlighted is the actual deep-seated pervasiveness of health and raced based eugenics. young able bodied white folks are ok with old people dying, POC dying, fat people dying, chronically ill people dying, disabled people dying.

don't for one second think this is separate from settler colonialism, capitalism, and systemic white supremacy. the collective obsession with youth and 'health' is entrenched in these things. young able bodies are the work force, buy things, create nuclear family units.

health is a social construct used to police othered bodies: Black and Indigenous people, fat people, disabled people, elderly people, neurodiverse people. what if i told you that "being healthy" doesn't exist?

if you're entire being is centred upon 'being healthy', what are you perpetuating? how are you defining that? is it based on the gym? on weight? on what you eat? if someone who doesn't look like you does the same things do you consider them healthy?

we can't be so soulless, a year into this pandemic where we have lost so many and so much, that we now start to worry because younger able bodied people are being impacted. if you're just now scared, where have you been for the last 12 months?

stop thinking: "oh i think if i get sick i'll survive COVID" and start thinking: "if i get sick who in my community will i pass it to that may not survive".

this is what keeps me in this even though i'm exhausted, and restless, and over it. i don't know if i'd survive, to be fully honest. but my own mortality doesn't scare me as much as accidentally spreading a virus and that being what hospitalizes someone, or, kills someone.