Seedlings of the Soul
On Inside Out 2 and my sense of self
I watched Inside Out 2 during summer of 2024. Sometime in June or July, I spent a full day baking in the sun with my cousins, dipping in and out of their pool, reading water-damaged paperbacks, and eating heaps of pasta salad. And — at some point during all of that — we rode to the cinema and watched the movie together.
To give you a basic premise of this movie: Riley, the main character, is getting ready to go to high school and she is having a few new emotions being introduced. Embarrassment, Nostalgia, Boredom, Envy, and the notorious Anxiety, who, to put it plainly, is about to wreak havoc on Riley’s sense of self.
In the movie, the sense of self is a spiraled, glowing object within the center of headquarters that is built from memories contained in the belief system. Mainly controlled by Joy, the sense of self is created from memories within the stream of consciousness, that sprout up from the belief system to headquarters that then spirals and intertwines itself with Riley’s sense of self.
Then enters Anxiety, who rips Riley’s current sense of self apart and shoots it to the back of the mind. Throughout the movie, she puts anxious memories into the stream of consciousness which creates Riley’s anxious sense of self.
When activated, Riley’s sense of self echos a one-sentence belief that encapsulates everything she believes about herself.
“I’m a good person” quickly becomes “I’m not good enough.”
The next time I saw my therapist, I told her this whole idea and premise. I told her how I wrote in my journal things that I’ve experienced or have had happened to me and what it has made me believe about myself, my life.
In the journal exercise, I included a list of negative memories and right next to it, the belief it formed. At the end of the exercise I wrote my all-encompassing sentence: Abandonment is my destiny; either I will leave or be left.
I imagined Joy was in control then and wrote an entirely different list of memories and the beliefs they created. Then my sentence: I am not afraid of happiness, ease, love or gentleness.
In other words: love is worth it, gentleness is security, happiness is my destiny.
I recently revisited this conversation with my mom.
“It’s like my sense of self is a garden and I have these thoughts about life, and people, and love that randomly sprout up or are hidden within all of the vegetables, and flowers, and good stuff. And I have to pull it up. But it’s like an invasive plant that keeps regrowing because I’m not pulling the entire root up.”
“Well, what if you are pulling up the entire root?” my mom asked. “But as you experience and learn more, you’re moving to different areas of your garden and seeing where else the invasive plant has grown?”
I don’t know.
“I mean, we don’t know whether your garden is 40 acres big or 4. What if you’re just on acre 2 or 3 and you find that the rest of the garden doesn’t have the invasive within it? Nothing to pull up?”
I think of my sense of self as a garden because plants have to be tended and cared for to stay alive. Any belief I’ve had about the world - negative or positive - had to be watered and somewhat coddled to stay alive. An invasive plant, most of the times, is just a foreign plant with no companions overstaying its welcome by trying to dominate an area. A flower without bees, birds, butterflies, a shrub without caterpillars.
Which made me ask myself:
In what ways am I still watering ideas of toxicity? What’s the root to my inherit mistrust? What memories am I watering that are sprouting and blooming into something that harms my sense of self? As I’m pulling up the bad stuff, am I using energy to water the good stuff?
Different plants attract different things. Different beliefs attract different people. Whether or not I want it to be, I’ve been showed time and time again that what I put energy into believing is brought to me.
The intention I put behind my seeds are the plants that end up growing. The energy I put into minding my garden ends up mirroring the capacity of my harvest.
Like a garden, my sense of self has to be tended to daily, watered, weeded. The garden does not need to be completely started over. It just has some bad stuff growing that’s starting to wither, that needs to be uprooted and thrown away, that need to decompose for good.
There are still flowers blooming, vegetables growing, and herbs sprouting. Over the last year, I’ve even had a few butterflies come around and a bird that’s become a regular visitor who’s slowly starting to become a trusted companion.
Saturday, 15 February 2025
An archived unabridged snippet of a journal entry.
On the 8th, after work I sat in the kitchen cutting out squares of used oatmilk bottles, amazon shipping boxes, and chicken broth containers made of cardboard. I took them outside and sat in the damp, soft ground putting handfuls of soil into the boxes. That day, I planted bell pepper, peas, bush beans, spinach, onion, and green bean seeds.
Only a few days later they started to bloom. Today, a few of the little seedlings are growing taller, bursting through their seeds, and shedding their shells. It has been so exciting watching these little plants come to life. Already these little seedlings have taught me much about patience and how to wait for good things to grow. How to look at what appears to be barren, seedless soil and continue watering anyway, encouraging sprouts. It’s a lesson I must take into my healing. Will I ever feel like someone is worth the watering and waiting?
