During lockdown I spent a lot of time reading about conspiracy theories. There. I admit it. While everyone else was cleaning their homes (which I also did), baking bread and juggling a full-time career and family, I spent at least 18 hours on the internet watching “documentaries” like Plandemic and some other badly produced films with ominous music, manipulative cuts and self-professed experts who were uncovering ‘the truth’ behind Coronavirus.

For those of you who didn’t spend your time watching these “documentaries”, the basic premise is that Big Pharma and Bill Gates planned Coronavirus. It’s spread by 5G. It’s no more dangerous than the flu. The end goal is to vaccinate us and insert a microchip that will control the human race and change our DNA, and it’s somehow linked to a peadophile ring. The last one I watched ended with, ‘Who wears masks? People who have something to hide.’ You cannot argue with that logic.

So before I go further, this blog is not to argue the merits or demerits of these arguments. This blog is way more personal than that. It’s about me. I spent hours watching these documentaries, instead of getting into a new Netflix series or furthering my education or playing with my kid more. And I’m left asking why am I so fascinated by these theories. Am I trying to understand how other people believe things that to me feel so manipulative and extreme? Am I trying to learn counter-arguments? Or is it deeper than that? On some level do I actually believe in them?

I think the conspiracy theories point to a few things, but mainly to a very deep distrust of the medical industry. Luckily in my life I haven’t had much need of doctors or hospitals. The only real experience I have ever had with ‘the medical industry’ is when I gave birth.

So while one side of my family believes vaccines have been created to turn us into zombies – the other side of my family is academic. My father is a doctor, and growing up we were given antibiotics for every scratch. When I was pregnant I suggested to a cousin on this ‘science-is-god’ side of the family, that I may consider a home birth. That week I had every single person in this family call me to tell me a story that they had just happened to hear, that very same week, about a terrible tragic home-birth story.

And so when I did give birth I opted to try please both. (Both sides of myself, in case you want to rescue me for being too co-dependent). I planned for a natural birth. I did a ten-day silent meditation retreat. The Mama Bamba natural birthing course. And I found a strong, knowledgable doula to support me. But I also went to a hospital, a supposedly ‘pro-natural’ hospital that has a private birthing pool and a low caesar rate. The theory I had learnt from all the prep work is that the more we try to escape pain, the more you feel it. There is no pain in labour because pain is your body’s way of telling you something needs to change. If you move with it, the pain moves too. And during labour, it worked! I was in labour for two days, but I found that the contractions weren’t painful. In fact, they could be almost pleasurable.

Unfortunately the midwife at the pro-natural hospital had other ideas about birth and pain. Once I was in her care, she wanted me to lie as still as possible with a mechanical, medical machine around my abdomen so that she could monitor the baby’s heartbeat. This was not the wild labour I had envisioned. Staying still in labour feels like a form of torture. And when you feel like you are being tortured, it’s hard to produce happy hormones. Some would say that could put your baby in distress. But the link between a mother being in distress and it affecting her baby has never been medically proven, and therefore it didn’t exist in this hospital setting.

I spent three days recovering from birth in the hospital. ‘Recovering’ is an indulgent word, because I wasn’t sick or hurt and I wasn’t on any medication. But this was preCovid and I was enjoying the perks of medical aid. Also the post-care this hospital provided was special.

It didn’t feel like hospital, it felt like parent school. It was an institution where couples were learning how to become new parents. Our baby was with us all the time. But the nurses kept checking in on us to make sure we were remembering to feed him. I got berated once or twice because I let him sleep through the night. They showed us how to change his nappy, and kept him wrapped in the little blanket and breastfed.

After three days of baby and me being half-naked most of the time, it was time to shower and get dressed. The nurse showed us how to bath our baby. And we put him in his very first outfit. At the hospital, clothes didn’t feel practical. But now we were going back into the world where people wear clothes, and drive cars.

And suddenly after this experience where I’d grown another person inside my body, and my body had had a glimpse of being a wild animal, I was in clothes, in a car, driving on a road. And that was the strangest thing because we are animals. We give birth, there’s blood, our bodies do things we don’t talk about, but then we are driving cars on concrete roads.

It struck me how strange it is that in 2018 we actually still do give birth and breastfeed. With the way we live you’d expect that we would put our fetuses in man-made eggs to mature. And only weird hippies would still insist on ‘carrying their own baby’.

But despite how civilised we look at work, our bodies, especially women’s bodies have a mind of their own and no matter how much society ‘advances’ or how much technology there is, or how much we pretend that blood and piss and poo and mucous don’t exist, women’s bodies are still beyond our control.

We are in a world that is removed from the world where our bodies exist naturally. We don’t hunt for our meat, but we eat animals. And we keep them in the most horrific conditions because we can’t kill them ourselves. Women are encouraged to go on the pill, because living with period pain and hormones is impractical. The idea that a woman could know her own ovulation cycle to prevent pregnancy is laughable.

We work in offices eight hours a day, five days a week, with no fresh air, in front of computers and it’s very difficult to explain, for most of us, how the work we do helps us get food and water. I knew nothing about childbirth or death, although they are the most natural ordinary things in the world. We give death to hospitals too, even though it might be the most profound thing that happens to us.

We need to vaccinate against sickness, even if sickness connects us to our bodies and our bodies remind us that we are animals and a part of nature and we were born in a pool of blood and one day we are going to die, like every other creature. I do believe there is a conspiracy. It is created by Big Pharma and Bill Gates and Google and cellphones and the meat industry, and every big business that is open 9-5, and ourselves.

I believe the conspiracy is that we are indoctrinated to believe that we’re not part of nature, when at some point we all know that we are.