A Single Rasping Crescendo

Inside Out 2, the dangers of the woke agenda, cicada musings

Hi, I’m Breanne and I’m glad so you’re here.

Maybe you’re tired of how loud social media has become. Maybe you need a place to visit and be encouraged to better show up for your life, not be distracted from it. Maybe you need more healing beauty in your days.

That’s what The Redemptive is for. Welcome.

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The temperatures are in the 90s where I live. The air is thick like pancake batter sizzling on an iron skillet. My skin is melting like butter by 7:00 am. I turned 35 a few weeks ago. Both of my summer babies have birthdays in just a handful of days. The passing of time has been something I’ve struggled with this year. I’m not nostalgic for the past. I’m anxious about where I am personally. I should be further along. I should have accomplished more. I shouldn’t still have so little to show for three and half decades of life. It keeps me up at night. 

My husband and I took our kids to see Inside Out 2¹ this past Saturday (major spoilers ahead). I haven’t seen a movie portray anxiety in such an accurate and compassionate way before. It showed how anxiety can completely take over when, really, it’s just your body trying to protect itself. The film showed, in such a delicate way, how Anxiety wasn’t the villain but it also didn’t need to be the one in complete control. It gave imagery and language to the reality of living with anxiety. You aren’t alway able to get rid of it, but instead you can learn to coexist with it. 

One of the pivotal moments happens when Riley is having a full blown anxiety attack stemming from her Anxiety-built Belief System which is telling her, “I’m not good enough.” Joy is frantically trying to help. In a moment of desperation, Joy simply throws her arms around Riley’s Belief System and embraces her, all of her.

I cried.  

A cruel symptom of living with PMDD is night-time anxiety attacks. I will sleep regularly for weeks and then, out of the blue, wake up in a hot sweat with a racing mind and a nauseous body. I’ll lay there trying to figure out why I would startle awake at 3am until I realize: Oh yeah, my period is due in a week. Here we go. 

Living with a chronic illness that gives you monthly depressive episodes, debilitating pain, insomnia, and anxiety attacks can cripple how you move through the world. Whole weeks get gobbled up. You plan out your calendar with dread breathing down your neck. You can start to believe you’re not good enough. 

I think what made me cry watching Inside Out 2 was seeing Joy fight for Riley. I know that’s not how it works in real life, but seeing it portrayed that way made me realize: sometimes I’m too weary to find God in my suffering, I need Him to find me. 

I need God to find me in circumstances that haven’t resolved in over a decade. I need God to find me in a diagnosis that can’t be cured, only managed. I need God to find me when going to church doesn’t feel safe because the insidious tentacles of patriarchal power structures seem to slither underneath and underpin everything. I’m thankful the curtain is being ripped down that hid these toxic systems for so long, and I also fear who else will be revealed as untrustworthy next. 

I need God to fight for me. 

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I’m writing this on the first day of summer. June solstice crowned with a blistering sun and splits in our yard as wide as my index finger. The sun sat in the west and turned the sky into peach-skin. No clouds, just smooth amber bleeding into rose. The humidity sits on my skin like a damp blanket. Just taking a casual walk on our property leaves me panting and exhausted. 

And it’s not just the weather that’s wearing me down. 

After sharing that we took our family to see Inside Out 2 on Instagram, I got asked by someone in a DM if the film had “any woke agenda” in it. When I asked them to clarify what they meant, they replied: “Ohh like, gay couples, ethnicities being the most important thing…that kind of stuff.”

Shocked that someone who follows me would feel comfortable degrading other people in that way, I took screenshots, carefully blotted out the person's name so they could remain anonymous, hid them from being able to view my story and posted my responses publicly. I wanted to help others know how to handle these toxic perspectives. I wanted to challenge others to educate themselves as to why saying what the original person said was harmful.  

My response: 

“What you're describing sounds more aligned with good representation (which is something we always support in this house!). I wouldn't call representing what the real world looks like for kids any kind of "agenda" and if it is, it's one I'm happy to support to help fight against dehumanizing fellow images bearers of God. 

Gay people exist. People of differing ethnicities exist. Shielding our children from that and only showing them media that looks like them makes those marginalized groups an "other" which contributes to dehumanizing them and causing potential real world harm. As Christians, it's our responsibility to treat people as image-bearers first and foremost and I believe labeling their representation in media as a "woke agenda" causes unnecessary division and hurt. Which is the last thing I want to do as a follower of Jesus.” 

I lost 80 followers in 24 hrs. 

I know in the grand scheme of things it’s not that big of a deal.² But I’m already struggling with being disillusioned by the Church in general. Then, to have a chunk from my tiny online community who claim to love Jesus hightail it away from me—some of them women who had followed and interacted with my work for years—after I spoke up for viewing others through a lens of dignity, it was….deflating. 

Maybe it’s not the “woke agenda” hindering the work of God in the world. Maybe it’s those who use the hunt for it as a way to dehumanize and ostracize fellow image-bearers that’s doing the real damage.³  

You can’t understand someone you keep at arm’s length. You can’t empathize with someone you’re bothered to see portrayed onscreen in a children’s movie. You can’t love someone like Jesus and “speak truth into their life” if you’re not also advocating loudly for how valuable their life already is in God's eyes. 

I don't know where along the line we lost sight of that, but most of the time it feels like the western Church is stumbling around, panting through heat of its own making, slowly heaving the life out of itself. And I’m weary of it. 

I pray God sends His rain.  

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I heard the first of our cicadas this week; a single rasping crescendo rising and falling out of the thick emerald growth around our house. Sometimes I wonder about the cicadas that emerge in the odd years. The years when they aren’t joined by droves of their kin thrumming so loud it rattles the sky. The years when it’s just a handful of them reverberating solos from their tiny rib-drums. 

Do they know what they’ve missed? Is there some inner instinctual part of them that yearns for something they’ll never know in their short life? Do they know the lines fell for them in places years removed from the bustle of being surrounded by a thriving community? I stand in the swelter of June’s last days and listen as this year’s cicadas fling out their unaccompanied notes, untangled and lonely all at once. 

I know what that feels like.

1. If you’re like me (a person who struggles with anxiety) and you’re concerned that the movie may be triggering for you, I can put my hand on my heart and say the way they addressed anxiety was delicate, emphatic and healthy. I can’t speak for everyone, but it did me a whole lot of good to see this movie. I hope it’ll do the same for you.

2. It’s really and truly not a big deal to lose 80 followers. When I told my sister what happened she said, “I know you’re not disappointed in losing followers, its the people themselves responding that way.” And that pretty much sums it up.

3. I could write a whole essay on how weary I am of the Christian witch hunt for the “woke agenda” in everything. Maybe I will. Maybe I’m too tired. I need to pray some more.