”Ever since that puberty alarm went off, nothing around here works the way it’s supposed to!”

 

Coming from Anger in the famous Pixar movie Inside Out 2, I was shocked at how vivid and surprisingly close to home the portrayal was the first time I watched the scene in theaters– the onset of puberty as a blaring red alarm: “The apocalypse”. Adolescence: a time of turbulence, emotional upheaval, uncertainty, and a search for identity– arriving suddenly and unannounced. At headquarters, control is taken away from Joy and the others. The arrival of new emotions is messy and chaotic, and the console has been engineered to become hypersensitive to operations, perhaps something that we’ve all experienced in the teenage years. Emotions are enlarged during this time of life, and anything can be a trigger. As the movie progressed, we see Riley’s self-consciousness and her constant need for external validation develop. And I understood her pain. I felt her emotions deep in my heart: the lack of self-confidence and a stable sense of self, the burning desire to fit in with your peers. As teenagers, we are overwhelmingly aware of how we are viewed or judged by others, and no matter how much the world tells us that everyone is focused on themselves, that everyone around us experiences the same type of feelings, our emotions seem to take over before our minds have the chance to put the brakes on a chain of anxious feelings. 

 

Towards the end of the film, Riley experiences a panic attack after being sent to the penalty box during the crucial hockey scrimmage that we think is going to decide whether she has a spot on the team. We see Riley desperately trying to calm herself down, while back at headquarters, Anxiety has created an anxious whirlwind around the console as she frantically tries to keep Riley stable. As I watched the scene unfold, I felt deeply, uncomfortably seen. Not just for my own troubles, but for the tens of thousands of teenagers who find themselves fighting for control. Riley has tirelessly worked towards this final scrimmage her entire time at camp, and the film allows her struggles to be felt in the hearts of the audience. Yet the harder she tried to succeed, the more the results she desired seemed to slip away. 

 

We hold on to what we cannot grasp. 

 

In the teenage years, why does everything seem so much larger, so much more significant than it may actually be? Why do we feel the need to treat everything as an evaluation of our self worth? 

 

Riley’s emotional journey reveals so much more than just the arrival of new, more complicated emotions in adolescence. 

 

The start of the movie establishes Riley’s confident sense of self throughout her childhood. We are presented with a series of affirmations: “I am kind. I’m a good person.” We later learn that this was in part mediated by Joy’s “Riley protection system”, which involves cleaning up all of Riley’s bad memories by tossing them to the “back of the mind” – literally. Joy uses only her positive experiences to create Riley’s sense of self– an identity made up of her core beliefs that guides her behavior. As Anxiety takes over however, she uses Joy’s system to her advantage, this time crafting a brand new identity for Riley based on her idea of what Riley needs to navigate high school. The tension between the two competing selves is part of what can make the initial shift from child to teenager such an uncomfortable and confusing time. 

 

A line from Anxiety captures this beautifully. How do we be ourselves if our new self isn’t ready yet?

 

Joy’s original strategy was to do everything she could to preserve Riley’s high self-efficacy. The problem is, however, that this creates a very simplified, one-sided identity built solely around positive virtues. When Riley encounters a situation that challenges this identity, she is lost and unable to accommodate. Anxiety, on the other hand, has tried to create a sense of self based on one metric alone: qualities that will help Riley be “popular” in high school. Riley’s sense of self in childhood developed by Joy was simple, pure, embodying the joyful innocence of a young child. Anxiety’s version reflects the stubborn, similarly simplistic view of the teenage mind that external validation and “fitting in” is all that is important in life. The transition between these identities is inherently uncomfortable, and it takes time for the more complex, mature self to fully develop. We get a glimpse of that more balanced, dynamic character towards the end of the movie, as she comes into herself, breaking out of an anxious cycle and reconciling her relationships with both her teammates and her friends from middle school, Bree and Grace. 

 

“Every bit of Riley makes her who she is.” 

 

The need for validation is a huge part of a teenager’s developing identity. Erik Erikson’s theory on the stages of psychosocial development names identity versus role confusion as the central psychological conflict of the teen years. Adolescence is about discovering who we are, what role we represent in our community, but at this stage of development, we often search for the answer not within ourselves, but in the people that make up our environment. The search for validation becomes especially powerful when the environment offers us a particularly narrow definition of success and self-worth. 

 

In a discussion with my school’s mental health counselor, he explained the problem with the system through which students derive their sense of value. In an academically competitive school, teenagers are often conditioned to develop a very narrow source of self-worth: high academic achievement. They measure their value and success solely through rankings and test scores in comparison with others. Even if they realize intellectually that grades are not the only measure of a person’s value, they feel unable to control the force of a social environment pushing them to play by the rules of the game. The feeling is suffocating. Intrinsically, you know that the system is compelling you to evaluate yourself based on a single metric alone, which isn’t hard to see is an irrational, senseless way to determine the worth of a person. Yet, persistent and uniform emphasis of the metric from the environment and peer pressure leaves you with no choice but to conform in order to survive. It’s hard to distinguish whether my drive for academic achievement really blossomed from my own intrinsic desires and motivation, or whether I am just another product of my environment, only I am now so deeply entrenched in the system that I have begun to mistake it as what I truly want. Teenagers spend a significant amount of their life in school, but is the school environment helping them discover their resolution to the conflict of identity versus role confusion, or is it forcing the same identity onto a fundamentally heterogeneous group of talents and minds? 

 

The portrayal of Anxiety in Inside Out 2 might encourage viewers to identify Anxiety as the antagonist of the story, yet Anxiety has always held Riley’s best interests at heart. She had taken her interpretation of what Riley needed and executed it to the full. But it didn’t mean that she was able to help Riley because her understanding was so narrowly confined. Short-term stress is fundamentally a protective mechanism that helps us survive. When faced with immediate danger, the brain’s fight-or-flight response sharpens focus and temporarily boosts healing functions. Stress can even serve as motivation, reminding ourselves of the urgency and importance in what lies ahead. Yet long-term, persistent, damaging stress has become so normalized in a fast-paced, competitive environment that we have come to see it as just an ordinary experience of everyday life. 

 

It’s because I can’t afford to do anything differently. 

 

In a time of identity versus role confusion, teenagers often develop ways of protecting themselves emotionally, ways of presenting themselves to others that they have established as a safe image in order to protect an unstable sense of self. However, this image is often mistaken for the entirety of who they are. A person’s outside behavior is only part of the story. 

 

Don’t judge a book by its cover. 

 

In the popular psychological films The Perks of Being a Wallflower and Good Will Hunting, we only begin to truly understand the protagonists and the way they behave as more of their backstory unfolds. In The Perks of Being a Wallflower, the beginning of the movie sets up the main character Charlie Kelmeckis as a quiet, socially awkward freshman in high school who struggles to make friends. Yet as we gradually learn about his childhood trauma, we come to realize that Charlie is not simply introverted. He hides his trauma under reservedness, but as we see his relationships with Sam and Patrick develop, we learn that he is also capable of deep connection as they help him open up and come into his own identity. His friends do not have the power to instantly resolve his mental struggles, but they were able to peel away at his protective cover and allow him to discover for himself the person that he is. In Good Will Hunting, the main character Will Hunting similarly puts up an image in front of others as a way to protect himself and conceal the struggles of his past, giving him a feeling of control. He is extremely intelligent and quick-witted, but rather than accepting help, denies his need for therapy and refuses to cooperate. However, as the movie progresses, we understand how difficult emotional vulnerability is for someone who had been harmed in a close, intimate relationship: childhood abuse. 

 

It’s not your fault. 

 

Even in the broader, more typical teenage experience, parents and sometimes even peers are often quick to label and criticize someone’s behavior without understanding. A student might say to their parents, “I am really struggling,” only to receive the response of “You’re not working hard enough.” This further reinforces academic achievement as everything that matters. How can a teenager reconcile between who their environment forces them to be and who they really are? 

 

The ending of Inside Out 2 establishes a full circle insight on the emotional experience of adolescence. Joy’s mistake was that she had tried to protect Riley by suppressing everything that made her uncomfortable- awkward memories, painful experiences while only keeping the things that contributed to a confident, positive sense of self. Both Anxiety and Joy thought they knew what was best for Riley. At the end, after Riley’s panic attack at the hockey scrimmage, they come to the realization that no singular emotion has the power to define her. 

 

“Every bit of Riley makes her who she is.” 

 

Teenagers are not merely trying to control themselves or rebel against what is expected of them. It’s not that simple. They are trying to figure out who they are in an environment that continuously tells them who they should be. They do not need to be free of anxiety, embarrassment or sadness. They need the opportunity and space to understand these emotions. 

 

Perhaps the goal is not to silence the puberty alarm, but to stop treating it as a sign that something is wrong.