Your Feelings Matter

Artwork by Trevor Pacelli

​By Trevor Pacelli
​Happiness is what we all want, right? Any good parent wants their kid to be joyful in whatever their circumstance, which is a wonderful mentality my parents sustained as they raised me to be a responsible adult. However, parents of past generations often communicated that their children’s emotions were invalid whenever they felt anything besides happy, sometimes being told to, “Stop crying!” We are learning now that children can’t stop crying on cue just because someone tells them to stop. I have noticed a cultural shift in how my generation of parents (millennials) is teaching their kids to process their emotions. Whenever my three-and-a-half-year-old niece cries, even about something as silly as getting startled by a loud noise, her parents just let her cry until she feels better, while comforting her with hugs. Their living room likewise reflects their parenting style with a sign on a wall that says, “All feelings are OK.”

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Pixar’s now ten-year-old masterpiece, Inside Out, embraces this very philosophy while going much deeper, teaching kids and parents about psychologically complex topics. It also has helped me, as an adult with autism, process and identify my emotions better.

The movie’s first scene sets the tone with Riley as a newborn baby in soft light, bundled up inside a yellow blanket. The music sounds nostalgic yet simple, like the music of new life coming into existence, and inside Riley’s head is her first emotion- the radiantly yellow Joy. Everything around Joy is at first pitch-black, until Riley’s first memory appears and the cogs form the new headquarters, looking warm and wondrous.

Then Sadness appears with the sounds of a tuba to kill the mood of the soundtrack, and from there, Fear, Disgust, and Anger come in, meaning Riley can’t be consistently happy like Joy prefers. While she comes to see how Fear, Disgust, and Anger all help bring Riley to happiness, Joy has no idea yet how Sadness helps in that end goal.

The five emotions tell Riley how to react to things throughout the day, and those in turn create her memories that are encapsulated in marble-like balls. Each one has its own color—the happy memories are yellow, the angry memories are red, the disgusting memories are green, the fearful memories are purple, and the sad memories are blue. Most of Riley’s memories are yellow, and very few are blue, reflecting how much Riley, like most people, wants to be happy all the time. Although there’s still plenty of darkness lurking in every whimsical corner that Joy and Sadness come across while stuck with Riley’s core memories. They navigate the land together, trying to get back to headquarters.

Moving from Minnesota to San Francisco put Riley into a serious mental breakdown and she temporarily loses her happiness and sadness, which sends her islands of personality crashing into the memory dump. The destruction of the colorful scenery around the world of Riley’s brain provides audiences of all ages with a helpful illustration of what a gradual descent into depression looks like. The train of thought is destroyed and sent to the memory dump. Renovations are made throughout Imagination Land, which means Riley’s old imaginary friend Bing Bong will have to soon end up forgotten forever. The Dream Productions studio has written disturbing dreams to reflect Riley’s experience, which get worse as Sadness gets the idea to scare her awake. Riley’s deepest fears are kept locked up, and one of them, Jangles the clown, is let loose to wake her up from her dreams.

The manic activity inside Riley’s head comes out in her actions when she gets the idea to run away, which shuts down the control panel, rendering Fear, Disgust, and Anger incapable of making Riley do or feel anything. Only Sadness can restore control back to the panel and get Riley to fix her mistake by returning home. Not only do these components maintain the plot’s escalating tension, but they’re also very real signs of what happens when someone grows depressed due to trauma or a massive change.

It leads me to the best way I found this movie can help anyone better analyze their emotions, which in turn can help them know what to do about their emotions. A couple of months ago I went on a church retreat, and one of our seminars included a lesson about understanding our emotions, which our senior pastor tied directly to Inside Out. The lesson included questions we can ask ourselves regarding our emotional reactions:

• Joy- What gift was I given?
• Sadness- What loss am I grieving?
• Fear- How was my safety endangered?
• Disgust- What desire of mine was unfulfilled?
• Anger- How was I wronged?

These questions, along with the movie, helped me as someone with autism better analyze my own emotions. For instance, if I ever walked out of a movie feeling upset by its poor quality, the above questions can lead me to conclude that I didn’t feel angry, since I wasn’t personally wronged by the movie. Disgust is a more accurate emotion to associate the memory with, because I had a desire for a better movie left empty. Thus, I can conclude that the correct mode of action isn’t to seek justice, but rather to not stress over the bad movie and move on.

However, getting to a satisfactory place like that isn’t easy for every memory that must be analyzed, as trying to understand your emotions from something as traumatic as a car accident or the death of a loved one requires a much longer recovery process. Inside Out likewise knows how long it takes, as the new core memory Riley forms at the end to represent her new life in San Francisco isn’t all yellow- it's yellow and blue. Living in San Francisco isn’t suddenly happy for Riley; it’s bittersweet, because she’ll always miss Minnesota. Her core memories from here also aren’t all yellow, they’re mixes of all five emotion colors, which reflects her coming of age. Riley didn’t reach that point of starting recovery by herself, she first needed to open her pain up to her parents, which is one of the best methods to eliminate past hurt. Once the memory is out of the dark, whether in a journal, a diary, or to a loved one, it’ll start to slowly burn. You too can bring yourself to a better place by listening and responding to your emotions, because whether you feel joy, anger, disgust, fear, or sadness, it’s always valid.

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Trevor Pacelli is a young adult on the autism spectrum as well as the author of What Movies Can Teach Us About Disabilities, What Movies Can Teach Us About Bullying, Summer of the Fruit Virus and the illustrator of The Kindergarten Adventures of Amazing Grace: What in the World is Autism?, and the author/illustrator of Amazing Grace Goes to the Zoo.