The Human Emotional Experience
I will not be seeing Inside Out 2 in theaters. I cried enough at Barbie last year and I can only imagine what this movie will do to me. Instead, I will wait to watch it in the privacy of my own home.
From what I’m seeing and hearing, Pixar brilliantly portrays what’s like to be a teenager. It’s not necessarily the “best times of your life” like other movies portray it. During these years, kids go through a radical transformation not just physically but mentally. It’s a time when kids start to discover the richness of the human emotional experience and it can be incredibly overwhelming. And as adults, we often forget how difficult it was.
The main character, Riley experiences a variety of emotions in the movie such as Joy, Sadness, Anger, Disgust, and Embarresment. One of the new emotions that shows up is Anxiety and that’s what I want to focus on.
Depending on who we are, we see anxiety first show up at different times. However, most of us start to experience it in force around ages 11-14. During this time, we start to experience more hefty problems and responsibilities such as juggling school, sports, clubs, friends, and relationships. We start to realize what could potentially go wrong in all these situations and what could happen if it does. It’s also a time when we start comparing ourselves with each other which can make us feel more anxious. All this is happening while our bodies are undergoing puberty.-it’s a lot.
Our society has anxiety all wrong and always has. For decades, millions of people suffered in silence without any help. If you did express what you were going through, you were often labeled “weak” or “crazy.” As time went on, people started to better understand mental health and its impact. Medications became available, therapy started to become more mainstream and people felt more comfortable talking about what they were going through. Mental health started to become a little less stigmatized and more understood. However, it’s important to note this shift came with a problem which I think this movie highlights subtly.
Anxiety isn’t always “bad”(no emotions are bad). I can get into the biological background of this, but small amounts of anxiety are here to protect us from potential threats. Think of how we would live if our brains weren’t alerting us from time to time. Just like happiness and sadness, it’s a normal feeling to experience. I see far too many people(especially in the younger generation) thinking something is “wrong” with them for feeling anxious from time to time. I think as a society we need to understand the difference between experiencing anxiety and having a disorder that consumes various areas of your life. We have to realize the difference between experiencing this emotion and what an actual mental illness diagnosed by a professional looks like.
With the rise of technology, we drifted apart from understanding our emotions. So many of us are confused as to what to feel and how to feel it. Life has become a mixed bag of feelings that seem scary and unusual in real life. I’m hoping this movie this summer gets us more in touch with the human emotional experience.
