We all contain multitudes

Our sense of self, understanding anxiety & delusional joy

Earlier this week, I joined the crowds of adults who saw Inside Out 2 and cried. Inside Out 2 is a triumph of what animated stories can do: with a bolder style (I see my darling Spider Verse’s impact!!), laugh out loud comedy moments, and a lot of emotive gut punches too.

What would I have done with a film like this as a teenager? It’s impossible to know when we only have hypotheticals, but it feels like it would have helped. I can’t know how I would have reacted back then, but some of the tears I cried at 26 were for my teenage self. You’re okay, I tell myself retrospectively. You’re going to be just fine.

The gentle and genuine portrayal of anxiety was beautiful. To reframe this emotion that is often seen in a wholly negative light as someone who is trying their best. An emotion whose actions, in the light of stressful situations and to our sense of fear, can seem like they must be doing something right.

Anxiety is a natural human response. It is a primal response. It is stress at its most heightened. And stress is not an intrinsically bad thing. We actually thrive when we have a good amount of stress in our lives; it makes us feel switched on. It lights us up, our brain relishes in the challenge, and we rise to meet the occasion. It is when the stress becomes too much that we burn out. That anxiety can rear its head.

The scene where Anxiety is fixed to the control panel, unable to let go as Riley’s panic attack grows, was a switch inside my chest. “I just wanted to help,” Anxiety says. I think of my anxiety and the ferocity with which it ruled as a teenager. You were just trying to help, I now understand.

I loved the portrayal of anxiety as something exists in everyone because it does exist in everyone. We all feel anxious in times of high stress when that stress no longer feels manageable to our bodies — when we believe that we’re under threat. That doesn’t make anxiety a villain. Just very natural.

In a time when everyone is categorising themselves by individual aesthetic labels — are you a Brat summer girl? A lit girl? A trad wife? — Inside Out 2 reflects a reality where a sense of self is something ever shifting. In fact, if we reduce ourselves down to one thing ‘A good person’ or ‘not good enough’ that is when we are left on shaky ground. Every experience we have lived builds who we are. All of them are important — even if we might want to forget them.

As I’ve written about before, I can be a bit of a chronic people pleaser. I can also love a little bit of a repressed emotion. In a conversation with a couple of women colleagues, we were talking about how we cry when we’re angry. And someone (a therapist in training said): “that’s because you don’t know how to express anger in a socially acceptable way.”

I don’t know what to do with my anger. But I also don’t always know what to do with my sadness. Perhaps you can imagine why I relate very strongly to Joy in Inside Out. And why it punched me in the throat when Joy finally lost it.

Joy is called delusional. And of course she’s delusional. To remain ‘joyful’ in the face of overwhelming hardship can make you feel delusional. To stay positive and silence anger and sadness is delusional.

It is all of this nuance that makes Inside Out 2 a film for everyone. And psychology aside, it is a witty, playful and empathetic film; I know I’ll be rewatching.

Perhaps as we get older we experience less joy, Joy wonders. But that isn’t set up as the case. At the end of the film, we are once again reminded that there is a place for all of our emotions as we grow up. Anxiety, anger, sadness and joy alike.