Through the Eyes of a Lion: Facing Impossible Pain, Finding Incredible Power

by Levi Lusko

I recently read a powerful story about Kristen Anderson-Lopez. She, along with her husband, Robert, wrote the song “Let It Go” from Disney’s Frozen. Like many of you, my family and I have not only seen this film a hundred times, but we own the soundtrack as well. (And no, I would not like to build a snowman.) “Let It Go” is not just a great song—it is literally the best. It won an Oscar for the best song in a motion picture in 2013. It’s so good that it changed the course of the movie: Apparently Elsa, the character in the movie who freezes everything, was originally going to stay bad. The slot where “Let It Go” fits into the movie was going to have a liberated and evil Elsa singing a song that was dubbed in the story outline as “Elsa’s Badass Song.” But when the directors heard “Let It Go” they were so moved that they rewrote everything so Elsa could be redeemed. Kristen also wrote seventeen songs that weren’t included in the movie. Seventeen times her songs weren’t right. Seventeen times she heard “no.” Most of us would consider ourselves colossal failures if we were shut down five or six times. It would be difficult to keep pressing full steam ahead after being rejected a dozen times. But she continued writing and creating and inventing and putting herself out there seventeen times. Let that sink in. Songs #1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, and 17 weren’t good enough for the movie. Attempt number 18 was a different story. This time the movie, as it ...