Why so sad?

The movie is about emotions. There are five of them — Joy, Sadness, Anger, Fear and Disgust, each represented as an animated character. Together they control an 11 year old girl, Rylie’s mind and try keep her happy. Joy and Sadness are the main characters in the story.

Joy is the team lead since she’s the one responsible for making Rylie happy. Others just support her and occasionally pump their respective emotions to protect her (Fear) or have her react to certain situations (Anger and Disgust). Sadness, however, never gets a chance to control her because they don’t want her to feel sad. Ever.

So no matter what happens, Rylie appears to be somewhat happy. Her reaction to every situation is positive. Until Sadness kind of starts to mess around with her memories and things get out of control. She loses both Joy and Sadness, and becomes emotionally numb.

Eventually both of them find their way back to her mind. But after a long journey with Sadness, Joy learns an important lesson. She learns that Sadness is important for Rylie. It is the emotion that helps her cope with difficult situations. It allows her to ask for help when she needs it, rather than fighting the battle all alone.

“Be positive!” is a very common advice we get, like Joy was forcing Rylie to be happy even though her life had had a drastic change. But suppressing our emotions when we feel sad can deteriorate our mental health. It may lead to a meltdown, as shown in the movie.

So in the end, when Sadness finally gets to control Rylie, she cries her heart out. She expresses her feelings just as they are — no denial, no suppression, no sugarcoat. She feels sad and she says that she feels sad. This ends her numbness and she can once again feel other emotions, including Joy. She can once again be happy.

When I feel sad, almost always I convince myself that there’s absolutely no reason to be sad. Life’s perfect, nothing’s wrong, everybody loves you, you’re doing great, you should be grateful for what you have, etc. etc. A lot of times, it does work.

And when I fail to convince myself, someone else does it for me. There’s always someone who’d tell me the same things — there’s no reason to be sad, be strong, life’s good.

But rarely does it happen that I get permission to be sad. Just to feel how I feel.

That’s about it.

Good night!
Aachman