By Liv Dunleavy Staff Writer It has been nine years since the world found out what goes on inside our heads, and I don’t think any of us were prepared for the slap in the face from reality that was “Inside Out 2.” At 13 we all reminisced our youth with Joy and Sadness, finding solace in the fact we all do in fact have emotions. Now we get to relive the trauma of our teen years with the addition of Anxiety, Envy, Embarrassment, Ennui (also known as boredom), and a brief (and much too early) introduction to Nostalgia. Again the story is focused on our girl Riley, now 13 and riddled with puberty, dealing with, or well in this case, being controlled by our lovely friend Anxiety. Similar to the original, the core emotions get kicked out of headquarters just in time for everything to become really messy. It feels like a slap in the face honestly, with the movie’s introduction of the “belief system” or what memories in Riley’s life have shaped her into the core of her being. We all have one, and from the start, Riley has been building a portfolio of memories that create her very being, what makes Riley, Riley. She’s kind, strong, brave, a really good friend, and mom and dad are proud of her. All of this combines in Riley’s mind to create her sense of belief. She believes she is a good person. When Anxiety shows up, though, the balance once shared by Riley’s emotions is soon overpowered by her extreme overthinking and need for control. Even the emotions hand the metaphorical steering wheel to her because she seems to have it “under control.” But do we ever have anything under control when we’re anxious? To keep Joy and the crew from ruining her plans, she suppresses Riley’s core emotions to the locked up vault where her secrets live. There they meet Pouchy, Lance, and a dark secret, who all help the emotions on their journey to find Riley’s belief system. Which is not an easy task, considering Anxiety sent it to the back of her mind, no big deal - just the farthest place from headquarters it could possibly be. All of this is happening in what seems like a critical moment in Riley’s teen life. A hockey camp weekend with her hockey future at stake and the news her friends will be separated from her in the coming school year. Yeah, how could this go wrong!? It seems being a teenager running on completely unregulated emotions is not the most healthy way to live. It shows that we all weren’t alone though. Staying up late, thinking of all the worst case scenarios we could muster, feeding into our own horrible imaginations that kept us up at night and ruined our sleep schedule, at least this way the movie validates our teenage angst. It all blows up eventually though, we all know that. Anxiety stews, it boils and builds. You push it down and you shove it away. It grows and grows until you simply cannot contain the strength of its clutching claws on your heart and your lungs - this movie does exactly that until the moment the dam breaks and you are sitting there crying while unlocking a part of you that you thought you’d grown out of. There is a lot to learn from this movie. Anxiety is a serious emotion, and also a valid emotion that everyone feels. This movie takes its time. It builds on Anxiety’s character, it shows the progression of her complexity and the slow building of an inevitable attack. Anxiety is not something that just goes away, nor is it something that defines you. But anxiety may be a part of you, and that’s OK. You are good enough and you are a good person. Take a deep breath, find something to ground yourself. You’ve come so far.