At the Movies: Inside Out 2

My husband and I have three teenagers right now, ages 18, 16, and 13.

Yeah, there’s a lot happening under our roof right now, including the introduction of more complex emotions as our children swim in the fresh, hormonal soup of young adulthood.

It’s been a while since I was a teenager, obviously, but it didn’t take me long to leap back into that teenage brain and remember what it was like to be 13, thanks to the animators and scriptwriters of Inside Out 2.

Inside Out 2

Pixar’s Inside Out 2 welcomes back the last cast of emotions from Inside Out alongside a whole new crew—Anxiety, Envy, Embarrassment, and Ennui—who come on the scene just as Riley turns 13.

The film begins with a look back over the last few years of Riley’s life and all that has gone into forming Riley’s identity, a series of core memories that shape what Riley believes about herself. Riley’s a good friend, a good athlete, a good daughter, a good student, and more, and she believes these things about herself… partly because Joy has been catapulting all the bad memories into the back of Riley’s mind.

That won’t come back to haunt her.

On the verge of high school, Riley and her two closest friends are invited to participate in a hockey camp that may or may not determine whether the girls will get onto the high school team. But when Riley discovers that her best friends are going to go to a different high school than her, the weekend takes a swing in a completely different direction.

And that’s when Anxiety comes in.

Finding the Love: Faithifying Your Viewing

Adolescence is the season of our lives when our identities begin to take shape separate from, but still influenced by, our parents. Who am I and what do I believe are two prominent questions we all were trying to figure out as teens, whether we were conscious of it or not. Our beliefs influence how we interpret events, the way we respond to those events, and the feelings we have about those events. In other words, our beliefs fuel our emotions.

In high school, I believed I needed to behave, score, and perform well to earn love and attention. We didn’t throw around the phrase, “I have anxiety” much when I was in high school, but looking back over those years, Anxiety’s fingerprints were everywhere. Public speaking made me anxious. Performing during marching band and dance made me anxious. Getting good grades made me anxious. What we correctly label “anxiety” now I just called stressed, busy, overwhelmed, ambitious, and a strong work ethic back then. 

But no matter how great I did, it never seemed like enough, and if I failed or messed up, it felt like the end of the world.

“I’m not good enough” fueled anxiety, which fueled a drive for perfection, which, if you haven’t tried to be perfect lately, is impossible.

Anxiety manifested itself as tension headaches and poor sleep habits the fall of my freshman year of college, cresting and crashing like a tidal wave sometime mid-semester.

My inability to be perfect, despite me and anxiety’s best efforts, drove me to my knees, literally. 

I became a Christian that fall and experienced the concept of forgiveness for the first time. Despite the deep relief I felt after confessing my needs and shortcomings to the Lord and asking for Jesus’ lordship in my life, I still felt compelled to earn my place in relationships through striving for perfection.

Then I went to Australia on a study abroad trip for spring semester, and I learned the phrase, “No worries, mate.” I took just three classes that semester—an Australian literature class, an Australian/American political science class, and a prehistoric science class— all sandwiched between weekend trips to different corners of paradise. 

All of the stress I had been putting on myself to be as perfect as possible began to seem silly in light of oceans and beaches and the long arc of time. Being in another country on the other side of the globe and learning about millions of years of natural history disoriented my position at the center of my personal universe. In the grand scheme of everything, I was a speck of dust, animated by Spirit for a couple blinks of an eye in the timeline of the universe.

Why not, as the Teacher in Ecclesiastes put it, just enjoy the little bit of time under the sun we have?

That attitude lasted for a little while, until I got married and worried over whether or not we’d ever be able to have children, and then later worried about stressful work relationships, and then later worried about my mom’s cancer diagnosis. In a few short years, anxiety ratcheted back up again.

“You’re never going to get rid of anxiety,” a counselor once said to me. “Everyone has anxiety. It’s a natural emotion. But sometimes anxiety gets out of hand. What you can do is develop coping skills to manage anxiety so that it doesn’t interfere with your everyday life.”

Inside Riley’s brain, there’s a whole new storm of emotions, and all of them serve a purpose. Even anxiety has a role in our lives—anxiety helps us consider different scenarios and outcomes. It triggers our body’s fight-or-flight response. It helps us set goals and work to achieve them. Anxiety can prompt a person to communicate their concerns (confess their sins) and seek support (and forgiveness) from others. Anxiety can lead to self-reflection and greater self-awareness. And being able to manage anxiety can build resilience for future stressful situations.

Anxiety can even drive us to follow Desmond Tutu’s fourfold path of forgiveness—tell the story, name the hurt, offer or ask for forgiveness, and renew or release the relationship—which Riley models beautifully.

All of our emotions serve a purpose. All of them belong. When I’m in tune with what I feel, it leads to greater self-awareness, a deeper relationship with God, and an enriched connection to our community, so that I can love my neighbor as I love myself.

Inside Out 2 gave me all the feels (you did it again, Pixar!), but most of all, gratitude and joy, both for my teenagers, whose heads are currently swirling with all kinds of complex emotions, and for the faithful patience of God, who knows exactly how we’re made because his hand was in all of it, and walks with us through every new season, over and over again.