Inside Out – a reflection on sadness

Growing up can be a difficult and turbulent process! 

The movie Inside Out portrays this! The main character in this animated film is Ridley, an 11-year-old girl forced to leave her hometown in Minnesota and move to San Francisco, where her father got a new job. Like all of us, Ridley is influenced by her emotions - joy, fear, anger, disgust and sadness - and the experience of leaving her friends, her old home, the places she loved to go, and her favorite hobby wasn’t an easy task. Although joy try to keep things positive, emerge conflicts between emotions about how is the best way to face this new phase of life. The story unfolds within the mind of Ridley, more specifically in the control center, where the emotions (protagonists of this movie) have the function of processing the information and storing memories of this girl. 

In inside out the joy is thin, tall, bright, attractive and colorful, on the other hand sadness is gray, short and chubby and the best thing that she can do is to be quiet and keep a low profile to avoid causing problems.  This picture portrays well what’s happening in today's society. We don’t want to be sad! And, the fact that we don’t assume this emotion and don’t allow ourselves to feel sad is something that has daily consequences. The high consumption of antidepressants and the variety of books that teach the way to happiness and success are real examples of this. 

To be sad is to fail! Fail with ourselves, before the others and before the expectations of society. However, as the Pixar film illustrates, problems tend to multiply when the role of sadness is devalued. 

Sadness has a sensory function, it is something natural, intrinsic. It’s an emotion that internalizes us and, somehow, forces us into introspection, something contrary to impulsivity. Sadness makes us stop to think and try to understand better what we feel and why.  It can be a good thing! It gives us the ability to perceive what is less well and the opportunity to improve, to be more authentic, to know ourselves better and to open the door to creativity.  

The painter Van Gogh fed his art through his anguish