'Encanto' and Mirabel

Millennials and Mirabel have a lot in common when you think about it.

A lot of kids in this generation were described as 'gifted' and smart and talented from very young ages. As a kid, I was very smart and was reading at a high school level when I was in elementary school. A few of my friends excelled in sports beyond average players for their age. One girl in my second grade class actually invented a toy for her brother who was a toddler and patented the product and sold it.

A lot of us started us exceptional.

But at one point, we stopped being exceptional to everyone. Maybe we hit a spot where we were surrounded by people as talented as we were and we no longer stood out. Maybe we hit a failure of some kind and everyone wrote us off. Maybe we were outpaced by siblings.

At some point, people started ignoring us. If we didn't stand out or give our families something to brag about, we became obsolete.

We became the source of everything bad that happened.

My uncle once made a joke that something was my fault, and to this day my entire family makes the joke that everything bad is my fault. It hit a breaking point with me when my cousin who owns a ranch in the country cut off his own fingers with a harvester blade by accident. I went to the hospital to visit him and his kids wouldn't let me in because someone joked to them that it was my fault and they thought it was true.

I left the hospital in tears and no one apologized, no one told them otherwise, and no one thought they did anything wrong. I was in the wrong for 'being too sensitive about it'.

My generation gets blamed for everything. We kill the diamond industry, we eat too much avocado toast, and now apparently we're killing the Romantic Comedy Genre of films.

My best friend made one comment on Facebook about agreeing to monitor police more closely, she's Black and we don't live in a good neighborhood, she's been stopped before for walking down the street and harrassed by cops for nothing.

We had so many people message and call us both to stop being so political and to just tolerate the cops as they were and if she didn't do anything she 'shouldn't be afraid of them'.

I complained about a class I was taking in College one day to a co-worker and she started yelling at me that I was taking advantage of my 'free' college experience because I'm a Mexican and it was her taxes paying for it. She actually made a complaint to our boss and I got in trouble. Even though I don't even qualify for state funds, I pay for college myself.

Mirabel doesn't get a gift but she overcompensates for it as much as she can by helping out even if she's not needed.

Sound familiar?

We want a place to belong, not just millennials but as humans in general. Its built in our DNA that we must contribute to our tribe to survive. Humans are social creatures, it's a survival instinct, because if we can contribute to our community they in turn won't shun us.

Theoretically.

Our families have a record of isolating and stressing the Millennial generation more than any that came before us and Gen Z is still the 'baby' generation.

If you have a younger sibling, you understand that. The younger siblings can do no wrong, they are the baby so they need to be taken care of.

Millennials I feel like are the 'middle child' syndrome in a nutshell.

Mirabel just wants to make her family proud, and isn't that all any of us wants? We want to make our loved ones proud