Respecting The Balance

Are we all just Elisabeth's with our own little Sue's?

To: Her

Yes, I do,
I look for you
in twilight blues
in the smallest things,
the morning dew
don't you know, my sweet angel Sue?
I yearn for your perfect tune
when you light up a pitch-dark room
how you wear your daisies like I would
my sorrows and pessimist blues
Maybe one day I can be a little less cruel,
be a little more true,
against your laurels and curls
and everlasting bloom
just like perfume
phantoms residing in my rearview

I won't have to pine after you,
sweet angel Sue,
    one day I will be new—

and when I look in the mirror,
I won’t have to look for you.

se.

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Not the easiest topic for this week, but I did say I'll challenge myself this women's month, so 😵‍💫🥹💌

This week is about envy and how we, as naturally flawed women in a patriarchal society that tends to pit and compare us against each other, have used other women to determine our sense of worth.

This piece is definitely open to different interpretations, but for me, I wrote this for the idealized version of myself that I use as a goalpost for my self-worth and self-esteem.

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In The Substance, Elisabeth and Sue are usually used to represent agism, pretty privilege, and the unrealistic beauty standards that we have for women. However, another perspective I had of it was also the struggles of perfectionism and how one could rely on it for love, admiration, and belonging.

In the movie, Elisabeth is pushed to drastic measures to keep the very thing that gives her a sense of purpose: her job. As an entertainer, she is expected to be beautiful, almost flawless, and most importantly, young. But as her years pile on while she centres her life on her work, she finds herself alone, unemployed, and quite past her prime. She agrees to take a regimen that includes a mysterious serum that supposedly brings out the best version of yourself—beautiful, charismatic, talented, wanted, and of course, young. This is where she meets Sue and (to her demise) finds out that there is more at stake when you don't understand how to respect the balance.

While their duo (or shall I say, rivalry) successfully depicts the weird fetishisation of youth in women and how beauty can be their most valuable currency, I think one thing people don't often talk about is The Balance.

What is the balance, and is it even achievable?

Perhaps one of the more interesting ones I've read about the dichotomy of Elisabeth and Sue is the balance between our youth and our later age. What we do recklessly in our youth is painfully and inevitably paid for by our older selves. However, as a closer relation to the film's more major topics, I also saw The Balance as a representation of our inner critic and need for perfection.

Like Elisabeth, we all have an inner entertainer who strives to perform to the best of our abilities no matter what kind of role or character it may be. And much like how she had Sue, we have in ourselves an idealised figure of who we are or should be before we call ourselves worthy of anything. Like Elisabeth, we crave our Sue's like a cure-all drug. There is usually a version of ourselves that we detest (possibly the one we see in the mirror) and one we consider as someone more deserving of love, affection, and acceptance. Respectively, in her awakening, Sue held a lot of disdain and resentment towards Elisabeth, who on the other hand, held Sue on a pedestal to give up on putting any effort into living at all. Elisabeth has irrevocably convinced herself that Sue—the version of herself that she deems as the best—is more deserving of the life she wanted. Any attempt she makes to fight it, she would have Sue at the back of her mind, and eventually, staring back at her in the mirror. All this to say: we can be blinded by the idealised version we have pitted ourselves against.

If we aren't careful, it won't be our reflections that we will see in the mirror. Instead, we see the figure we unrealistically cannot become, projected onto a vague silhouette of who we truly are.

This is how we become our very own monsters.

Elisabeth eventually lets herself slip into a deep depression and finally gives up on life. Sue finds this appalling and is quite frustrated at how grotesque Elisabeth is acting and treating their life. Sue quickly loses her respect for Elisabeth’s autonomy and decides to steal more for her benefit instead, literally sucking the life out of her older counterpart. Elisabeth resents this, of course, as she is starting to drain out and disappear. Still, in the end (and again, to her demise), she is consumed with her idea that Sue is the only key to living the life she wants.

It is a vicious cycle: we hate ourselves for everything we aren't yet to the point that we lose the motivation to actually let ourselves transform into who we want to be. And in turn, we end up restricting ourselves from living the life we hope for until we become the figure we are waiting to turn into. In the wake of our pursuit of self-improvement, we unintentionally feed a self-loathing belief that is not only counterproductive in reaching our goals, but also poses an unnecessary weight on our emotional and mental health. All because we fail to see how our current forms are actually enough.

Before Elisabeth spiralled into her eventual unravelling, there was a small window of hope when an old acquaintance of hers invited her to a dinner date. No other information was given about the man in question, but we do know that this symbolised the second chance for her to see The Balance for what it is.

What if she had stepped out the door? What if she hadn’t let the reflection of Sue taunt her and gave herself the chance to live the life she wanted, too? What if she realizes that she doesn't need to rely on the existence of Sue to find love, happiness, and fulfilment in her life, and instead decides to live it regardless? If she had realised in time that she didn't have to wait around for perfection until she can lean into the things society otherwise says she can’t, we would’ve had a completely different ending—and an entire movie, at that!

The dichotomy of Elisabeth and Sue is a great depiction of how we truly can’t hate ourselves into improving, nor can we over-glorify a version of us that we'll wait around for before we even decide to live authentically. I realized that one of the best ways we can truly advocate for ourselves is not through constant nitpicking and self-improvement, but to see ourselves reflected as we are, and delight in the unique way she's showing up in the present. Because soon, she might be the past that we'll regret not loving enough, and a figure our past selves have been praying happiness for all this time.

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Thank you for reading my little musings and poetry! It means a lot to me that you are here, reading through my diary of sorts. Know that I can’t wait to read yours too :)