A few weeks before I left for school, I took my little sister, Elizabeth, to see "Inside Out," a relatable, imaginative, and emotional Pixar movie. My little sister is my best friend. She is 12 years old and she is adopted from China. Whenever we go out together, everyone always thinks that she is older, because she is several inches taller than me. Saying goodbye to her when I moved down to Texas for college was probably the hardest thing I’ve ever done, partially because I would miss her so very much, but also because I knew how hard it was going to be on her.
When I took her to see "Inside Out," I became very emotional. It is about an 11-year-old girl named Riley who has always been an innocent, happy little girl until new changes in her life introduce new, not-so-happy emotions. Riley’s emotions, characterized by little people, have to wander around her memory in order to get back to their home base, from where they accidentally got relocated. As they try to find a way back, they go through parts of Riley’s memory that used to be bright and sparkly but are now gray and dull. One of those memories is that of her imaginary friend, Bing Bong. When Riley was a little girl, her best friend was a pink bear named Bing Bong. Even though he was imaginary, they did everything together, and she had such a fun, beautiful imagination. As she got older, that happiness, innocence, and wild ingenuity faded away to nothing. The movie got me thinking about how amazingly quickly time flies and things change.
Changes are difficult to see when you have known someone the entirety of their life, because you see them every day. When you see someone every day, you don’t notice changes over time, just major, immediate changes. However, watching "Inside Out" really put things into perspective for me. I was a third party to Riley’s story; I could look at it in an unbiased and condensed format. Seeing how quickly she grew up caused me to step back and evaluate the people in my life, like Elizabeth. When Elizabeth and I were young, we did not have to have imaginary friends like Bing Bong, because we had each other. However, that doesn’t mean that we didn’t create magical worlds and crazy, hypothetical scenarios for our dolls and pets with our imaginations. One of my fondest memories of us as little kids was when we would brush the dog, put her on her leash, and pack a bag full of her ‘stuff.' We were ‘going to a dog show,’ of course! I know that neither of us would do this together now, as we have outgrown our imaginations.
The movie made me feel nostalgic because of connections I saw in the film to my life and my sister’s life. It was a realization point for me that I, too, was soon going to completely leave my childhood behind. All the innocent times, sweet memories, and worry-free days have slowly become increasingly rare as I have reached my teenage years, and now that I will be on my own in college, they will become almost completely a thing of the past. I will be leaving comforting, home-cooked meals and goodnight hugs for sub-par food and studying into the wee hours of the morning. Watching the film also made me realize how fast my sister is growing up and how much of her growing up I am going to miss when I’m away at school. I am afraid that when I go back to visit, she will have grown into someone I don’t recognize anymore. Riley, the girl in the movie, experiences so much change at one time and begins to feel sad and disconnected from her family and the things she used to love. My sister is also going through a lot of change right now, being at a new school and not having me at home anymore, and it makes me sad to think that she might feel like that too.
Because of Elizabeth and because of "Inside Out," I believe in the now. I believe in sometimes slowing down when you’re in the middle of it all to sit back and take note of the situation you're in and take life day by day. What with all the immediate, rapid-fire social media we have today, it’s easy to want things now, but sometimes it’s okay, great, in fact, to just sit and observe and be happy about where you are at this second instead of worrying about what’s coming next. I believe that my fear of time flying by too fast is a blessing in disguise for me to enjoy being in the moment to make it last just a little bit longer.
