On a Monday morning, the pharmacist injects my deltoid muscle with 1,000mcg of B12. It’s the biggest needle I’ve ever had. Thick syrup, metal lingering, the nails digging into my leg aren’t enough to distract me from the pain and a small noise comes out of my mouth just as the injection finally comes to an end.

It has been four years of chronic fatigue, chronic pain, and chronic suspicions that my brain is decomposing like an animal on the road. Haven’t been able to think very easily. I haven’t felt like a thirty year old, I’ve felt like this slurring old ghost communicating to you from the 1930s. Four years of seeing a role call of different doctors every time I go in, and only now does one of them think to mention B12. She says my recent bloods show I’m just about within the normal range but I might want a top-up. I drag myself to the pharmacy around the corner. They don’t dispense B12, they say; they inject it. Thirty quid. I’m given a leaflet, and I read it sitting on a chair so small that my body claims the one next to it. I’m slow getting through it; slow re-reading the part where it says other countries have significantly higher standards for what counts as a healthy amount of B12 in the system. The system, the body. England disappoints me all the time. How was I to know? It’s been four years half-joking that this must be what dementia feels like. Four years before a glossy leaflet full of stock art tells me that a B12 deficiency at its fucking worst can cause dementia. I get back in the queue to pay.

The next day is euphoric. Lights on, defibrillated, whatever; I text everyone back. I answer emails like it’s nothing. I have excess mental energy for the first time in forever that when I go to bed and discover I can’t sleep, I happily practise Spanish out loud in the dark to my cat and the moon. I think I must be fluent. I wake up 2 hours before my alarm, read a book, read the news. I know everything, and the days come and go so easily. I do my taxes. I book all the appointments I’ve been meaning to get to: dentist, nails, hair, vets. I look at MAs and PhDs and job descriptions and research how much it would cost to spend a month in Chile totally on my own, because I’ve had an idea for a book and — god, I feel like an athlete just doing life. And I feel social again, replying to everyone’s stories like a drunk auntie. I can feel myself being a bit annoying with how hyperactive I am all of a sudden. My boyfriend says that B12 is making me be twelve. Yes, and rather that than the old ghost he’s been living with all this time. My imposter. I think the pharmacist performed an exorcism. I think I’m a child again.

It turns out B12 is responsible for the production of adrenaline. It turns out people with my disability, POTS, can struggle to absorb B12 through their diet. It turns out I have the ability to read medical journals too, which is good because I can’t expect that long list of doctors I’ve seen to know everything about everyone even though I want them to. It also-also turns out vitamins are real. In all honesty, I haven’t been taking them seriously because of their A, B, C, D infantile naming system, but they have my respect now. Respect, adoration. Give vitamins the Nobel Prize. There’s only one problem. The leaflet stipulates a 28 day gap between injections. I feel so good right now. I just have to hope it lasts.

A week later, I am witnessing a different kind of injection. A gloved hand is injecting something into the yolk of an uncooked egg. The yellow responds. It wiggles with a bouncy, alien consciousness that reminds me of the 90s comedy Flubber. It splits off into a second identical yolk that swims away from the first until its reaches the perimeter of the gloopy albumen. I’m watching the beginning of The Substance, the new film directed by Coralie Fargeat. What follows the egg intro is a high-energy mental breakdown, a fairytale gone wrong, a science experiment, and a long, stylish advert for therapy. Plus, a lot more injections. Metal into broken flesh.

The story is about a 50 year-old celebrity called Elisabeth Sparkle, played by Demi Moore, who is fired from her role as the instructor on an aerobic home workout programme because the Leonardo DiCaprio-TV exec in charge thinks she’s past it. Her brittle sense of self worth shot to shit, she is told about a mysterious workaround called The Substance. The process involves taking a special injection in order to create a younger, idealised version of yourself; a bouncing second yolk. Elisabeth is so depressed and panicked by her age bringing on the end of her career that she goes ahead with it, whatever impossible thing this even is. She feels she has no choice. She makes her order, gets it from a locker in a seedy building, and then we watch as the first jab makes her collapse to the ground and a 20-something model clone climbs out of Elisabeth’s bleeding spine. This second woman is called Sue, and she’s played by a dolled-up Margaret Qualley.

According to the rules of The Substance, even though they are two distinct bodies, Elisabeth and Sue are each other. The way it works is that each of them takes turns being conscious while the other is comatose at home and hooked up to a feeding bag. In order for the conscious one to keep going, she has to drain the sleeping one of some of her life-force fluids and inject them into herself every day. But, every 7 days, the two have to switch places in order to replenish their bodies. It doesn’t quite go to plan, though. In Sue-form, Elisabeth has a bigger lust for life; she auditions to be her own replacement, becoming more successful than she ever was in her original body. So, she flat-out does not want to return to her 50 year-old body — the one that got her involved with The Substance in the first place. Insecurity leads her to push the 7 day Cinderella-limit so that she can carry on being Sue a while longer; so that she can dance, and be praised for it, and have all these old men weak at the knees.

But there are rules for a reason, and Elisabeth pays the most ironic price. Every time she cheats on her time as Sue, her Elisabeth body ages rapidly. First, she notices her finger. Yellowing, liver-spotted, angular, and altogether dryer than it used to be. The next time, it’s her leg. She wants to inhabit this older Elisabeth even less, and so she spends more time as Sue, which means she gets older and older until this catch-22-depressive-episode means she is hunched over, creaking and just a completely unrecognisable crone. She should have been careful what she wished for! She should have been fine with who she was, and god, we’re all our own worst enemy, and beauty standards are fucked, and it’s lonely on top, and men are still in charge, and — yeah. It was a film about a lot of things I don’t think about very often, because I don’t really care what I look like or how the outside of me changes as time moves on, but I enjoyed the white-knuckle ride it took me on. Like Elisabeth and Sue going at it, by the time the film ended, I felt like I had wrestled somebody and the other person had won.

I also left feeling like I should probably have some opinions, because it is one of those rich, gobby films that is going to spark a thousand hot-takes. But I couldn’t put my finger on what the film had given me, not straightaway. I just vaguely appreciated the way all of its political commentary seemed to have been cast in aspic. The film positions ageing as the most horrific thing that can happen to a woman, but it also has relentless black comedy sniggering all the way through the cinematography that seems to say yeah, and it shouldn’t be this way, and how ridiculous that we have let things get this far, that we have let men do this to us, and now we do it to each other. I liked watching that criticism play out through sheer hyperbole — in the old school friend speaking like he was on a stage, in Elisabeth trusting an advert for The Substance that looked as if it had been made by a graphic design enthusiast on Tumblr. Her bathroom void looking like the kind you would make to torture depressed Sims. The overblown portrait in her own living room; the billboard that later squares off with it, impossibly placed so that it faces directly into her high-rise apartment. Sue’s Eric Prydz’s Call On Me music video-workout routine that nobody at home could ever hope to follow in their living room; the matching Benny Benassi Satisfaction DIY sequence in which Sue does a full home renovation, just pure fantasy. And then, of course, there’s the fact that a second full person climbs out of a slit in Demi Moore’s back.

Hyperbole made for such a good ‘get over yourself’ approach to storytelling, and I enjoyed the snark in every scene. But I left feeling like I had no stakes in my own opinions, and that this was a story for other people, and a review to be written by other critics. It wasn’t until another week had passed that I could see how The Substance might have anything to do with me, and then its big cinematic shame slapped me in the face.

Three weeks after the pharmacist injected me with thirty quid’s worth of B12, my adrenal sprint came to an end. I did an interview for a podcast and floundered; when I listened back, it was like I had answered a different set of questions. My boyfriend asked what I wanted to eat and I forgot all food that has ever existed. I messed up in my Spanish class so many times that I gave up and started speaking English. My teacher suggested we move back to a primary school level, because I couldn’t remember how to form numbers. The old ghost was back. I felt myself split in two; I saw B12 as The Substance that transforms me from Elisabeth to Sue, from the stuttering, buffering, monolingual Gabrielle to the one who’s good to go, good to speak. The one who has ideas, who can say that she was born in mil novecientos noventa y cuatro en vez de los 30. I watched The Substance thinking I was some mentally well person with none of the insecurities that would lead me to do anything tan loco, but — no.

I really hate the version of me that doesn’t feel like me. I own up to the internalised ableism, and the ageism, for wanting to bellyflop so desperately into the fountain of youth, back to a time before I was disabled. Ableism for not wanting to stay this way, and in feeling that way, damning the other people who have made peace with their dysautonomic state. Ageism for everyone beyond even this age, battered by work and unable to remember what they did last week. There are rules to The Substance as there are in the real world, and the pharmacist can only dispense me a shot every 28 days. I had 7 days ahead of me like Elisabeth always did; and I would have paid more to skip the queue. God, I wanted to break into the pharmacy. My friend told me about someone they knew who discovered you could buy B12 injections in bulk off of Etsy and was injecting herself constantly. Well, it’s only a vitamin, I thought. You can’t overdose on B12 because the excess just comes out in your urine. Getting it off Etsy is crazy, but feeling mindless for four entire years is probably worse. But now I’m planning my calendar around this four-week-cycle, and wondering if I can ask everyone in my life for a B12 voucher for Christmas so next year’s lucidity is taken care of.

I wish I was a better person but I’m not, and maybe that’s why I enjoyed the film — even if the enjoyment was delayed, like my brain, and this review; I had to wait for my 2nd round before I had the head to write it and so, I’m signing off as Sue.

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