The Substance Changed My Life

Blanket statement. Full stop. No connotations.

It’s 2:11AM and I’m extremely fucked up. Better now that I called a friend, but this movie has me thinking about myself and the world like I never have before.

I’m really sad about my health. I have chronic pain and chronic digestive issues and asthma and all of these things. But hey, it can always be worse. Never think about the better, just think about working with what you’ve got. Life is short so live it well and do all you can to make the most of it.

Fuck society, fuck norms, and fuck social media. Fuck technology. Like, literally. Fuck it and love it so it can love you back.

My friend today said that we can’t use technology as a tool for advancement in a capitalist society as fucked as ours. We can’t use it to its highest order without revolutionary change. I want to be better. I want things to be better. I feel like I have no control over things getting better in the world, all I have is myself, and that’s why I should love myself. Deeply and dearly.

I am led to the conclusion that this is a cautionary tale, duh. But it’s more than that. It’s a deep reflection of the vulnerability and susceptibility we are to images and the technology that molds us. 

We see ourselves through screens and reflections of the best versions of ourselves. What we want others to see. We create a chimera of parts of our body and mind that show only the things we want to show. Technology is a stage for all to act on. No matter how much we post, though, we cannot escape ourselves. We can not remove oneself from oneself. We are one, as the movie says. Your digital reflection and your AFK self are the same exact thing, so you have to take care of both, and mold both, give time to both, and blend them seamlessly.

The movie resonates a lot with this specific time period. There are so many things in this world that cause illness and death. We will always, always be fucked up and there is no turning around from that. No one person can change that. There is no visionary, there is no great muse, there is no militant leader that can get us through this. The world is changing. People are dying. Genocides among genocides are being pushed by the mainstream norm of American culture and I’m told all I can reasonably do is vote about it. There’s no escaping this hegemony, no place in the world that is absent from the terrors of self-imposed religious bullshit. I’m sick of it. Decolonize now. Make my brain stop hurting. The psychological horrors of our time are perfectly encapsulated in this movie through imagery of self harm in the place of self fulfillment, and vice-versa.

The ableism lens in the movie is painful. We see bodies not aligning to our vision of beauty as wrong, evil, terrifying, and to be aborted. The way we banish disabled people from society has been curated and crafted since the settlers arrived. With the dawn of Covid-19, we have accepted that disabled people should be hidden away, outcasted, and dead. We have accepted and grown complacent to these ideals of supremacy. People’s lives are deemed unworthy because they are different and cannot keep up with the pace capitalism demands from us. 

I am terrified of getting older. I am terrified of my temporarily abled status becoming closer and closer to expiring. So what is to be done? IDK, make art. That’s what Coralie Fargeat did. Organize, try to be better, don’t accept the world and become complacent. I am guilty of not living up to all of those things. You are too. Don’t wait. Do it now. Change your life now. Do it now. Before it’s too late and you’ve taken the matrix all the way down to its disgusting core and watch it multiply. Your fears, your doubts, your bad habits, they WILL eat you and become you.

We are all versions of ourselves all the time and we have to live with it. In this reality, in this time, there is no escaping ourselves. Maybe in fleeting moments, on drugs, or in realities we are visiting. But the sober, true, honest reality of it all is inescapable. Your highs will always bleed into your lows; your lows will always bleed into your highs. Regulation and control is what we can ask of ourselves.

Writing this and organizing my thoughts made me feel a lot better. It externalized my anxieties, but it still does not change them. I am scared of becoming ungrateful. I am scared of staying ungrateful. I vow to accept my body and live as if every day is my last day.

The Substance changed my life.