If you don’t follow me on Instagram, or if you don’t monitor your feed like a cat sighting birds through a picture window, you can watch the origin of this post below.
The text version is that, like a proper thrifty fox, I’m reusing my middle school teaching supplies for blog posts. My friend Kara drew me a card for this week: Which song inspires you most?
On Instagram, I said I’d answer with the Backstreet Boys. Their songs can certainly inspire scream-singing, emphatic hand gestures, and an edifying belief in the sisterhood of women. But the more I considered their catalog, the less pragmatic its inspirational offerings seemed to be, at least for someone who’s almost 40.
Mostly, a BSB song is inspirational if you want to bend to male pressure to switch romantic partners. Especially one who has no material assets and is willing to overlook a few light felonies. One who is not exactly good but may at least have it goin’ on. And as much as I might have enjoyed writing about such an answer, I’m going to give you the earnest one instead.
The song that inspires me most is from Frozen 2.
Fight me.
As we’ve discussed, Frozen 2 is a sacred feminine tour de force. I love all the songs, really, and the way they weave together the themes of accepting change and self-actualization for both Anna and Elsa.
But if we’re talking inspiration, then we’re talking about “Show Yourself.”
The first time I watched Elsa belt this out, I sat with my fingers curled around the theater seat in front of me, nodding vigorously during the first half and sobbing vigorously during the second.
To say that I identify with Elsa as “Show Yourself” begins is a monumental understatement. She’s a seeker. She senses something beyond this small version of herself, and while CONTEMPLATIVE PIANO music plays, we hear how desperate she is to find it.
I can sense you there
Like a friend I’ve always known
I’m arriving
And it feels like I am home
Show yourself
I’m dying to meet you
Show yourself
It’s your turn
Are you the one I’ve been looking for
All of my life?
Show yourself
I’m ready to learn
Pardon me for projecting, but she’s looking for God.
Specifically, the type of god who might scoop you up with one giant hand and sketch out your life’s purpose on a whiteboard with the other. Because even though Elsa sings that the presence is “familiar,” and “like a friend I’ve always known,” she’s still searching for whatever that is outside of herself. She wants answers. She wants an answerer.
The pace of the song picks up (EXCITING PIANO!) as Elsa anticipates finding her Answer God. And she explains why a lifetime of repressing her extraordinary, reality-bending gifts might leave her with a question or two.
All my life I’ve been torn
But I’m here for a reason
Could it be the reason I was born?
I have always been so different
Normal rules did not apply
Is this the day?
Are you the way
I finally find out why?
If you’re a weird person, maybe the type of highly sensitive, highly curious weird person who expends great effort to hang with the Ozark-watching humanoids around you, you know why she’s looking for a WHY. If we’re going to suffer the eternal isolation of being odd, a decent reason could soften the blow, at least.
And if that reason comes with a bit of specialness (an owl and a letter, a Jedi with a midichlorian counter, a man with mirrored sunglasses and a couple of pills, etc.)? Ten thousand times better.
That’s why Elsa is also seeking a WHO. It’s extremely comforting to believe someone is in charge of this whole mess. Someone who can tell us not only why we’re weird, but that we’re supposed to be weird. Yes, we’re strange but yes, we’re also beloved.
The WHY is for her mind, but the WHO is for her heart.
Alright, so then, after some more musical coaxing, there’s this beautiful, gut-wrenching crescendo. The song shifts. And suddenly it’s not Elsa’s song at all anymore. It’s her mother’s.
Come my darling homeward bound, her mother beckons, to which Indina Menzel brings absolutely every ounce of her epic voice in reply:
I am FOOOOUUUUUUUUUNNNNNND
And then I’m ugly crying. Elsa has sought and she has found, but she hasn’t found what she thought she wanted. There’s no Answer God here. No giant pair of hands, no detailed set of either answers or instructions. There’s only her and her story.
Elsa was right to sense that familiar power at the beginning of the song. It was her own.
Show yourself, she and her mother sing together, but now they’re no longer singing to the mysterious someone Elsa was hoping would step out of the ice cave. They’re singing to Elsa. Step into your power, they say, as Elsa’s sparkly white dress sprouts billowing fabric from her shoulder blades. They’re wings, people. WINGS!!
You are the one you’ve been waiting for
All of your life
(All of my life)
Oh, show yourself
And then we ah-ah-ah-ah out to the end and I am deceased.
So what does this song inspire me to do?
Well, Frozen 2 came out right after I had quit teaching, when my identity wound was still fresh and bleeding. At the time, this song lent me some courage to stop undersharing and, you know, show myself. Not the highly curated teacher version of myself, but my real self. Weird ice powers included.
I still lean on that from time to time, whenever I find myself retreating into the safest possible writing territory (jokey joke jokes). But beyond that, the almost daily inspiration I get from “Show Yourself” is that the call is coming from inside the house.
That I am the one I’ve been waiting for.
See, I have a tendency to want to be delivered from things. To want an undercover agent to notice vast, untapped writing potential from within my classroom, for example, even when I hadn’t written anything in a decade. Or to want a plain-clothes therapist to feel the anxiety radiating off of me on a sidewalk and drag me into her office to be fixed.
Or, in general, to want God to float down on a cloud and fish me out of a jam. Any jam. To set me on exactly the right path that leads to the finish line. To be more Koopa Troopa than still, small voice.
And if divine fishing is out of the question, then I want God to at the very least lay a golden key in my trembling, sweaty palms that reads SPECIAL GIRL. And then to whisper, “You know, actually, you’re the way all those freaks are supposed to be.”
What “Show Yourself” reminds me is that no one else is coming. God is happy to whisper and nudge, of course, but is not generally in the business of self-actualizing the humans (otherwise it would be called God-actualizing). “Show Yourself” reminds me that being okay with myself is an inside job. As was changing careers and going to therapy and all the other big moves I would have preferred someone else make for me.
In conclusion, guess what else? I didn’t even want to watch Frozen 2. If I’d had it my way, I never would have heard the song that inspires my entire approach to being a person, and you would have been reading a post about “Hey Mr. DJ.” But I was coerced by a willful four-year-old, which is the final lesson for us today:
Sometimes the still, small voice is more like a raucously active firecracker of a small voice, and if you want your life changed, you better heed it either way.
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