You're Not Delulu. You're Awake.

on calling your energy back

Recently I watched They Live, a random ‘80s sci-fi flick I came across on TikTok before I decided to take a break from social media. The premise is that a drifter arrives in LA in search of a job and comes across a special pair of sunglasses that reveal the world “as it really is,” according to the film’s lore. Things go monochrome; subliminal messaging in the media to consume, conform, and reproduce is made plain; and many elites are exposed as skull-faced aliens draining humanity of its life force. Very subtle, I know. The movie isn’t very good – the transparent social commentary smacks you in the face in every scene, and often to the detriment of the narrative – but it did strike a chord with me. It highlighted something I think many of us are intuitively aware of: there is more to life than the status quo around us, and a lot of the media we consume is not so harmless. There is an anesthetizing effect that keeps us entertained but not fulfilled, leading us to consume more and more in hopes of soothing a longing of which we aren’t quite sure of the source.

I’ll soon be retiring my “warning: cosmic activities ahead” disclaimers, because if you’re here, you probably already know what I’m on. I’ve written before on the piece of divinity in us, our creative consciousness. As I said then, I’m of the mind that we all have “an ability to tap into the divine within us, the part of us that has access to the possibilities we can’t yet see but have the power to make material.” With it, “we have the power to do what has never been done before, what others may claim is impossible.” We are supposed to be actively attuned to this power and use it to create our lives and ourselves in the way we want to, but instead we have been misled into believing that thinking this way is delusional. This is a term that the cosmic girls (myself included) have reclaimed to combat the notion that we have to ascribe to the arbitrary standards of what has been deemed “realistic.” But in recent months I have steadily moved to the conclusion that we’ve got things all the way fucked up. You’re not delusional for knowing that you have the power to live the life you want, for believing that you can create a reality you enjoy living in. You’re awake. The idea that we just have to succumb to circumstance, and work really really hard, and things will still kind of suck anyway unless we luck out – that is the delusion. The idea that only a select blessed few of us, the chosen ones, get to pop off and enjoy their lives is the delusion. These ideas, quite frankly, are bullshit.

I’m not so far down the rabbit hole that I’m convinced the ruling classes are freaky-faced aliens siphoning away our energy, but in our world they don’t have to be. Consider the lives many of us live. We work isolated, screen-facing jobs for such long hours that when we do have free time, we’re too exhausted to pour any energy into ourselves – that is, exercise, nurture a hobby, or perhaps strengthen relationships with the friends and family we increasingly live further and further away from. This is to say nothing of the constant low-grade anxiety that we’re supposed to accept as just part of modern life, a phenomenon so all-encompassing that the notion of having a lazy Sunday has been co-opted by the “Sunday Scaries.” We are so tired, and free time is so scarce, that we often opt to spend that time in front of yet another screen, this time for leisure. Typically we punctuate our time in front of that screen with scrolling breaks on the other screen that has become our closest confidant: for many of us, it is the first thing we connect to in the morning and the last at night. Some of the girlies can’t get this level of facetime from their boyfriends.