Everything ever after

On emotional journeys and processing Inside Out 2 and books about mental health

My husband and I recently took our daughters to see Inside Out 2. A couple of days prior, we’d re-watched the first Inside Out in preparation. If you’re unfamiliar with these movies, they are Pixar-produced confections about a young girl named Riley, the way her emotions function inside her head and how what she’s going through—a move to a new city in the first movie, a hockey team tryout camp in the second—affects her mental health. The starring emotions are Joy, Sadness, Fear, Anger and Disgust. In the sequel, which finds Riley also starting puberty, we meet Anxiety, Envy, Embarrassment and Ennui.

Not to spoil them or anything, but the movies are, in a word, Emotional.

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I remember watching the first one in the theater with my husband and crying like I’d been cut open. And I had, by the idea that letting yourself be sad can be a good thing, the film’s primary message. There’s a moment, as we near the story’s climax, when a token of Riley’s past makes a sacrifice to save Joy and by extension Riley herself. It’s my favorite scene in the movie. That lesson—that we can’t take everything from our childhood with us into adulthood—is also central to Pixar’s Toy Story series. But there, the toys are tangible things. They can be held, played with one last time, given to another kid to enjoy and love. In Inside Out, our feelings and memories are fleeting and known only to ourselves. They can leave us without warning, a heartbreak we may feel subconsciously but don’t necessarily notice, even when it’s for our own good.

After seeing the second movie, the four of us went out for dinner and had a lengthy conversation about how it compared to the original. I shared that my favorite scene was when Joy seems to come to terms with the idea that as Riley grows up, she might feel less joy. My kids both pointed out that the scene, like my favorite in the first movie, is a sad one. I acknowledged the seeming incongruence of saying I love something that isn’t happy, pointing out that, as both movies show us, sadness is not necessarily a bad thing. In fact, sadness and joy often go hand in hand.

Once you’re past Inside Out 2’s full denouement, it’s possible to conclude that Joy’s in-the-moment observation isn’t true, that there isn’t inherently less joy in adulthood. It’s possible to believe that there are just more feelings period and they all feel bigger. So if joy was the driving force in your life up until the point when all those puberty-borne emotions move in, it might feel pushed aside, even if only momentarily. Personally, though, I don’t think she’s wrong. I’m OK accepting that there is less joy. In part because I don’t know that joy is—or has ever been—the emotion running the headquarters of my brain.

Joy is the leading character in these movies, which are about Riley. But if you watch closely, in the brief glimpses we see inside Riley’s mother’s head, Sadness sits in the middle and seems to be the one calling the shots there.

“Signal the husband,” she says.²

“Uh, oh. She’s looking at us. What did she say?” Anger, apparently Riley’s father’s lead emotion, says in response.

“Sorry, sir,” his Fear pipes in, “No one was listening.”

It’s a funny moment, of course, meant to lighten the mood. But it’s also revelatory. What if Joy isn’t front and center for everybody? What if happiness is not the default? Neither the journey nor the destination? What if she’s along for the ride like all the rest of the things we feel? Not better or worse than any of them, just there.

Maybe it’s me, or a symptom of my post-high-achiever maladjustment, but as I’ve grown older, the idea of happiness has often felt like a race. Not a feeling, but a kind of validation I’m supposed to achieve and/or constantly provide for myself and others. A line that, once reached and crossed, will usher you into the stress-free promise of “happily ever after”—except the line never actually materializes in front of you.

For the record, this isn’t a post about how the fairytales of our youth were lying to us. But those stories, like everything else in society, assigned value to how and what certain things are supposed to make us feel. In light of that, it seems positively revolutionary to think of every emotion, instead, as an essential piece of you that needs nurturing. Even (especially) the ones we have come to see as negative or bad. All of them are there in the “ever after.” If it’s not all happiness, it’s not because you aren’t doing it the way you’re supposed to. It’s because “ever after” is just life, and life isn’t just one thing. It isn’t right or wrong to feel a particular emotion at a particular time.

Is childbirth a moment for Joy? Of course. Sadness? Yeah, that too. Anxiety? Ooh, boy, yes.

Any one of these left unchecked can skew our sense of self and the version of ourselves that we choose to show the world. But all of them together, working in concert, begin to approach what it means to feel whole. Everything we feel matters. What a relief to know this. What freedom.

What this has to do with books

I recently finished the audio book edition of Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories that Make Us by Rachel Aviv. It’s an exploration of mental illness and the history of psychology and psychiatry as seen through four case studies and two personal experiences of the author’s: her own brief hospitalization for anorexia as a child and her research into what happened to a girl she met during that period of her life. Here’s what I wrote in my review:

There is much here that will fascinate, enrage, educate, enlighten and even endear. Whether the topic of mental illness is of interest or the factors that play into people's experiences with it, our health system, or the expectations of society against a diagnosis that can feel like both a liberation and a brand, Aviv's human-centered story-telling keeps what could be otherwise extremely dry material not just cogent but emotionally honest. Not a book about psychology so much as it is about people.

I was still thinking about this book when we went to see Inside Out 2. Given that they are made with kids in mind, the movies flatten a few of the principles about emotions and our minds that Aviv touches on in greater, more complicated detail. On the whole, however, much of what the movies say about how humans process emotion and memory feels right (to be super on-the-nose about it). Dissociation or depression may seem like sadness, but they are not the same as sadness. Benign pressures, like Riley’s mother calling her “my happy girl” in a talk about helping reduce her father’s stress, can escalate inside of us and lead to negative consequences. Even Joy can veer into delusion and breaks from reality with the potential to cause internal and external harm.

The most important take-away of the Inside Out movies, though, is that they provide a language about mental health that is accessible to kids, not just to talk about mental health in general, but to connect to things that speak to our own specifically. As Aviv’s title and book point out, stories do make us. How we tell stories and how we respond to them frame how we respond to the world around us.

So many of the books I read as a child, a young person and as an adult were mental health stories, but I didn’t know it at the time because I didn’t know what I didn’t know. Now, it seems so obvious. Take The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger. When I first read it at 15, I remember feeling seen—although I wouldn’t have put it in those words at the time—even though there were no commonalities to be found between me and its principal character. Not long after, as a more cynical college student, I felt sheepish for having fallen for what others saw as merely a collection of coming-of-age cliches. But all these decades later, that emotional first reaction lingers within me like the glowing orb that signals a “core memory” in Inside Out. I understand my younger self’s feelings about that book. A search for connection to something, for an emotional response within ourselves to the world as it perceives us, can be difficult for anyone for lots of reasons. Catcher addressed my own feelings of teenage disillusionment, which were magnified at the time by a hormonal imbalance (diagnosed a couple of years later) that made me prone to depression.

Young adult literature is littered with kids going through it, emotionally speaking. If Holden isn’t the one for you, try Julia, of I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter, a daughter of immigrants with none of his privileges but no easier to like. Women’s stories, too, have long simmered with emotional resonance. Whether in memoirs or fiction about mothers, wives, sisters, every version of us has been popping off pages with feels for ages. The Yellow Wallpaper walked so we could say the quiet part out loud. Knowing what to listen for brings me—dare I say it?—Joy.

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Book Bites

• What I am reading right now: The One Hundred Years of Lenin and Margot by Marianne Cronin

• What you need to know about the book: Its main characters are terminally ill.

• What you need to know about me: I didn’t understand what it meant to live with a chronic illness until it happened to my mother.

• What I am listening to right now: I am in between audiobooks because I just finished Northern Spy by Flynn Berry, narrated by a female actor with a very accessible North Irish accent.

• What you need to know about the audio book: It is about Northern Ireland and two sisters who get caught up in the IRA in the years after The Troubles were supposed to have ended.

• What you need to know about me: I have always been fascinated by the history of this region of the world and the art has produced.

What My Kids Are Reading Right Now

• The Percy Jackson and the Olympians series - My 12-year-old is a sucker for a fantasy series, and I’d been trying to sell her on this one for ages. I finally got her to read it by suggesting we watch the recent Disney+ adaptation first. Never let it be said that TV and movies don’t get kids to read. She’s on book 2 and loving it.

• Everything by Shel Silverstein - I know parents can’t express unbiased opinions about their children, but I am speaking facts when I say my 9-year-old is excellent at drawing. She has always admired great book illustrations. I’m not sure what compelled her to pick up the collections of Silverstein’s poems, which I have loved since I was a kid, but I think his art had something to do with it.

Book Reviews and Recommendations

Here are a handful of titles that I’ve enjoyed in recent years that touch on mental health:

• I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter by Erika L. Sanchez - There was a lot to relate to for me in this book about a teenage girl dealing with depression (without understanding exactly what that is), grief and the feeling of disconnection from parents who don't understand you (a.k.a. life as a teen). After her sister's sudden death, Julia feels burdened by what she sees as an unfavorable comparisons to her even though she's gone, as well as by expectations about what she is supposed to do with her life. Because she narrates the story, her anger and frustrations are palpable and in your face. So are her mistakes. She isn't an easy character to like, and it would be easy to judge her if her trauma—both what she has gone through and what she has inherited—were not also right there on the surface. The author tells a powerful story, focused so specifically on Julia that there are moments were I wish we could see more of everyone else (Julia's parents deserve their own novel), but the whole point is that even this girl, struggling with faults she is keenly aware of, deserves our care and attention. Whether or not you get Julia, the point is that she matters.

• I Love You But I’ve Chose Darkness by Claire Vaye Watkins - This book is a balls-to-the-wall, no-holds-barred exploration of postpartum life for an artist who yearns for her pre-child self’s creativity, vitality and freedom. It’s also an ode to her mother as well as a marijuana-induced escape fantasy of the kind only a white woman could get away with. You’ll hate her selfishness, empathize with her pain and respect her (perhaps grudgingly so) for daring to act on both so thoroughly.

• Heart Berries by Terese Marie Mailhot - This wrenching memoir is told through language distilled to its most powerful concentration. Mailhot's voice feels essential because we hear so few like it, and it’s painful to understand just how hard she has had to work as a Native woman not to be forgotten. She addresses her lover directly through most of it, but the “you” sometimes works as a reminder that the reader is part of the harsh world in which Native women and abuse victims must content with. It's not an easy read, but quick and important.

• Everything Here Is Beautiful by Mira T. Lee - This account of the life of Lucia, a woman with a serious mental illness, is gut-wrenching in multiple ways in that the author offers multiple perspectives as the story moves along. First, Lucia’s older sister, who has cared for one family member or another her whole life and can’t seem to find another way to be, then the men in her life (one her husband and one the father of her child) who waver between wanting to be there for her and needing to address their own weaknesses. And finally Lucia in all her tapped and untapped brilliance. Each of them are frustrating narrators, none more than Lucia herself, but Lee also switches back and forth between first- and third-person narration. It feels somewhat exhausting but also a nod to the very illness that causes them all to question who Lucia is and what this sickness in her brain has made of their own lives. Not a joyful read by any stretch, but there is joy and beauty in it. I think I might have liked it more if I had not read so many books recently that featured multiple narrators. Even so, it’s an affecting, emotional, very good read.

• Lab Girl by Hope Jahren - This wonderful rumination on plant life and a life devoted to its study was one of my favorite books of the year when I read it in 2018. It's a deeply personal memoir in which Hope shows us her demons as well as her saving graces: her best friend and lab partner Bill, her husband and son, and especially, the plants to which she has devoted her life. I have never wished more to have been a scientist than reading this book, and Jahren assures me in her lyrical explication of her vocation and her simultaneous dissection of plant life that I already am. Simply wonderful.

1. This picture is of concept art for the character of Sadness from a 2019 exhibit on Pixar at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science.

2. Among the great lines in cinematic history and I will die on this hill.