I saw the movie Inside Out this past weekend with my family. It was a great movie and had an even greater lesson in it which most people would not recognize but me being me, I had to recognize and share with all of you.

So if you know the movie, it is about a girl who has emotions in her head. They are joy, sadness, anger, disgust and fear. Joy is the main emotion and she is always trying to stop the other emotions from overtaking her turn. Well, sadness is the main emotion that joy has a problem with which if you saw the movie, it turns out that joy and sadness get kicked out of main headquarters because joy does not think that sadness should be a part of Riley’s core memories.

Who else believes this? That sadness is a wrong emotion and should not be a part of our core memories? As it turns out joy realizes that whenever she is around that sadness is also there as part of the emotions and that joy and sadness go hand-in-hand together. So, in order to get the emotions back on track once they got back to headquarters, sadness needed to take over and fix everything. Why, you ask would sadness need to fix everything? Because, sadness was and is the correct emotion. Why are we so afraid to be sad?

Sadness is a necessary emotion to help us get our stress out, fix our problems and get closer to the ones we love. It helps us make decisions and learn how to love, apologize and how to try again. When you try to block this emotion from your head you are missing out on so much of your emotions.

If this movie or me teaches you anything, is that emotions are okay no matter which one you feel. Just feel it and work through it and you will get back to joy eventually. If you block out sadness, anger, disgust or fear, then joy will not be real. You need all of your emotions to successfully feel and learn how to share how you feel.

So go ahead and feel sad today, but then feel anger, disgust, fear and once you are done understanding all of your emotions then you can feel joy and really mean it!