Thoughts & Filmings: Inside Out 2

Please enjoy my emotional response to a kids movie.

Spoiler Warning (kind of) for Inside Out 2

Inside Out 2 hit me somewhere I didn’t expect. For much of the hour and a half runtime, I was curled in that dark theatre, tears in my eyes, teetering on the edge of sobbing as I watched something, something I had never really seen; a heartbreaking vision of what so much of the inside of my head looks and feels like. 

When Inside Out originally released, I was in my second year of college. One of the more fun years of college, not the bad year of college; honestly, probably the best of a messy time finding myself. I watched it, enjoyed it, but I wasn’t able to see myself in it. It felt like a kids movie, a heartfelt insight into how our feelings intermingle; into how we feel everyday being these washes of joy and sadness and fear and anger and disgust.

I was never passionate about going to see the second emotional outing as a result, even upon learning my love and treasured Irish princess, Ayo Edebiri, was in the voice cast. I felt neutral to the endeavour, sure it would just be another romp into the emotional lessons of growing up. I am grown up. I consciously know and understand the trials and lessons of complex and necessary emotions. I am a grown up who has gone to therapy and knows the jargon and the impact of childhood and blah, blah, blah. Inside Out was a childhood movie about childhood emotions as it rightfully should be.

2, however, captured something about myself and brought it to a visual medium that made me realise something deeply ingrained into my core. The new emotional cast of the film were feelings we’ve all felt.  Anxiety, this manic, protective, intelligent thing that could outsmart everything else captured my insides. How it escalates, to more and more extremes, to feel seen and heard. To protect. To try make the future safer and happier, but with absolutely no real regard for its impact on the present. It is a character that I have found in the sticky, gooey parts of myself that I try to be kind to but struggle to allow to even exist at times. I saw so much of me in Anxiety, in their fixated attempts to survive. 

This movie has come into my life at probably the most prime time it could have, a time when I am the most unsure of myself that I have been in years. In a horrifyingly liminal state, currently emotionally homeless, and entering yet another transitional stage of life after months and months of transitional life stages (I highly recommend not moving your life across the world multiple times in half a year). I have spent months grieving the life I built and the friendships I’ve treasured for years and years only to find them all scattered across the world, from Edinburgh to Phuket to Seoul to Toronto, and to find myself back, lifeless, where I started. I have found my own manic orange voice in my head has gotten much loud and much more consistent; constantly whispering to me of all the terrible ways I have let my life fall apart. That I am simply not good enough. 

And that was the thing about Inside Out 2. It wasn’t simply the portrayal of anxiety that really had me see myself, that brought me to tears. It was the beautiful construction of the Sense of Self that truly felt like some mirror into my own fears. 

See, for a very long time, I don’t think I even had a Sense of Self. I was echos, mirrors, reflections of people and things that I hoped could keep me alive. When Riley’s Sense of Self first chimes “I am good. I am brave. I am strong. I’m a good friend” I found tears rolling down my cheeks in the theatre. I did not ever have a Sense of Self at that age, not one so sure and kind. 

Anxiety’s arrival, and subsequent destruction of the Sense of Self, its desperate attempt to build a new one through immense panic and preparation hit home. I have never seen what the inside of my head has felt like until it. That throughout my childhood, teens, and even early adulthood, that sharp and twisted Sense of Self was all I had. When the words “I’m not good enough” echoed through the cinema, I felt a sharp little twist in my heart. That was what it had always felt like, and the echoes of which have bounced around in myself even now, this certainty that I cannot possibly handle the change and transition of my life again. This desperate troubleshooting of endless scenarios. That if I think about it enough, I can fix everything. 

It’s exhausting. 

The whirlwind that Anxiety finds itself trapped in during the film felt so familiar. Almost comforting. The anxiety attack, the overwhelming and wholly consuming panic, the sheer desperation. I spent so much of my formative life doing exactly that. Pushing every flawed moment, every inconsideration, deep down. I repressed every bad feeling as there was nowhere safe to feel it. There was no one to really feel it with. I’ve felt so much for that sad, angry, selfish little girl who grew up so sure that to be any of those things meant she was deeply, truly unlovable. Who had no one in her life who could hold those feelings safely for her and show her there was nothing wrong with them. That she could be flawed, and even at times, awful, and still be worthy of being loved. So certain that if I had too big an emotion or too wrong a reaction and I would be unlovable.

Inside Out 2 carved out a little space in me to see how deeply all those feelings shaped that core belief. Inherently not good enough. Inherently flawed. Inherently unlovable. This core belief is one that I’ve spent more recent years trying to reshape into something kinder, reparent into something built out of love and not fear. It’s something I find myself at odds with constantly. Anxiety, desperate to think its way into fixing everything. Think its way into being a good enough version of myself. And the adult in me, who wants to be kind and gentle because both me and the world deserve a little more of that. I want to offer the gentleness to myself because I want to give it to other people. I want to be able to untangle all this complex feelings of shame and guilt from the little girl who just wants to be safe and loved and important. I’m really grateful to have seen this movie at the time I have, to have a visual way of understanding my own brain a little better. To see and feel what I already know, that it all comes back to self-protection even when it is its most desperate.

A movie that at the wrong time becomes merely a passing moment. But sometimes, a movie arrives at exactly the right time, and becomes a movie that makes you feel a little bit more whole. A little more seen. This was one of those movies for me.

Image source: Anxiety / Disney Wiki