I watched BBC Proms: Enchanted, Alan Menken’s Music for Disney the other night, and about four songs in, I was in bits. Not sad tears. The other kind, the kind that catches you off guard because a piece of music has just walked straight past thirty years of you and gone and found the teenager underneath.
Quick answer: Alan Menken and Howard Ashman’s Disney songs, especially Part of Your World from The Little Mermaid, resonate so strongly with neurodivergent people because they put a tune and a story to something many of us couldn’t put into words as teenagers: the ache of feeling like you don’t belong in the world you’re standing in, and the longing to be part of one that finally makes sense.
Watching Disney before you could just press play
I love Disney films. I always have. As a child, going to my grandma’s meant a trip to the cinema to see whatever was showing: Snow White, Cinderella, Bambi, The Rescuers. There were no videos, no DVDs, no streaming. You couldn’t watch a film over and over whenever you fancied it. You waited for the cinema to bring it round again, or for it to turn up on the television once a year if you were lucky. That waiting made every viewing feel like an event.
Then I turned 13, and I went to the cinema to see The Little Mermaid. It was 1989, and the film was brand new, only just out. Yes, that does date me, and I’m happy to own it.
I fell in love with it there and then, and it has been my favourite Disney film ever since.
Why this one landed differently
Disney had gone through a bit of a flat patch before that. We’d had The Fox and the Hound, we’d had Basil the Great Mouse Detective. Fine films, but nothing that grabbed me the way The Little Mermaid did. This one had a proper story, drawn from the Hans Christian Andersen tale, and it had extraordinary songs. It was also the first Disney animated film with music by Alan Menken and lyrics by Howard Ashman, the pairing that went on to write Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin, and whose fingerprints are all over that whole golden run of early-90s Disney.
I sang Part of Your World on repeat throughout my teenage years, and I still love it now. When I did amateur dramatics, it was my go-to audition song. I loved singing, acting, dancing, all of it, and these were, to me, the best musicals around at the time.
What I couldn’t do back then was understand why that particular song meant so much. I can now.
What Ariel was actually singing about
Part of Your World is Ariel standing in her own world, surrounded by everything she’s supposed to want, and still feeling like none of it fits. She wants to be part of a different world. Not because the one she’s in is terrible, but because she doesn’t feel like she belongs in it.
As a teenager, I couldn’t have told you that I felt exactly that. I couldn’t explain that I always felt different, like I didn’t fit in anywhere. I struggled to make and keep friends all the way through school. I was bullied. I was deliberately left out of groups. And underneath all of it was a brain that was quick, chatty, academic, a good speller, genuinely bright, and somehow that just seemed to isolate me further rather than help me fit in.
I know now that this was my neurodivergence. I didn’t have the words for it then. I couldn’t tell someone I liked them. I couldn’t ask anyone out. I couldn’t say out loud that I felt sad, or lonely, or on the outside of everything. So I did what I’d always done: I carried on, and I sang.
When you can’t say it, you sing it
Music has always done for me what words couldn’t. I’ve written before about how music helps me manage ADHD and emotional dysregulation, and this is the same thing, just further back. Singing didn’t take away the loneliness, but it gave it somewhere to go. Part of Your World said the thing I couldn’t say: I want to be part of that world, and I don’t know how to get there.
Ariel isn’t the only one, either. That same ache turns up right across Menken’s Disney canon, in Belle wanting more than her provincial life in Beauty and the Beast, in Aladdin wanting to be seen as more than a “street rat”, in Quasimodo watching the world from a bell tower in The Hunchback of Notre Dame. (Not The Lion King, interestingly. That score was Elton John and Tim Rice, not Menken, though it carries some of the same feeling.) Ashman and Menken understood loneliness in a crowd. They understood wanting to be anywhere other than where you actually are. That’s why those songs spoke so loudly to a 13-year-old who couldn’t explain what she was feeling.
It turns out I wasn’t unique
I’ve now been a youth worker for over 30 years, and I’ve worked with more teenagers than I can count. Plenty of them have felt exactly what I felt. Some of that is neurodivergence. A lot of it is just being a teenager, and there’s real research behind why.
The teenage brain is going through one of the biggest rebuilds it will ever undergo. The prefrontal cortex, the part that handles planning, weighing up consequences and keeping impulses in check, is still years away from being finished, and doesn’t fully mature until the mid-20s. Meanwhile, the emotional and reward centres of the brain are already running at full power. That mismatch is a big part of why teenage feelings run so hot and so fast: the accelerator has developed long before the brakes have.
At the same time, developmental neuroscientist Professor Sarah-Jayne Blakemore’s research on the “social brain” has shown that adolescence is when brains become specifically primed to prioritise peers over parents. That’s not a character flaw, it’s the brain doing exactly what it’s supposed to do at that age, reorganising itself around friendship and belonging as it prepares for independence. It’s also why pulling away from family and leaning hard into friendship groups feels so urgent and so consuming at the time.
And here’s the part that explains why it hurt as much as it did. A well-known brain-imaging study by Naomi Eisenberger and colleagues found that social rejection activates some of the same brain regions as physical pain. Being left out isn’t “just” an emotional reaction, dramatic or over the top. To a teenage brain, it can genuinely register as pain. Layer ADHD and rejection sensitivity on top of that, and it’s easy to see why it doesn’t fade quietly into the background. It’s confusing, it genuinely hurts, and it’s especially hard when ADHD is already making friendships harder to hold on to. I’ve written more about that out of sight, out of mind problem and about why your ADHD brain convinces you everyone hates you, when actually they don’t.
The audition I never mentioned to my parents
There was another moment watching the Proms broadcast that got me. The singers were supported by the National Youth Music Theatre. As a teenager, I had all the leaflets for that group. I desperately wanted to audition. I could sing, act and dance, and this would have been exactly my kind of thing.
I never brought it up with my parents. I told myself they’d say no, that they’d never let me travel to London to audition, and so on. The truth is my parents were genuinely supportive people, and if I’d actually asked, they probably would have said yes. The story I told myself was the thing that shrank my world, not anything my parents would actually have said. I’ve written before about exactly this pattern, the gap between thoughts and facts and the stupid first drafts our ADHD brains write about us before we’ve checked a single one of them against reality.
Had I gone to that audition, life might have looked completely different. It might have looked exactly the same. What I do know is that if I had gone, there’s a good chance I wouldn’t have become a youth worker, a job I’ve now done for over 30 years and one I still love. So maybe the story I told myself, wrong as it was, still led somewhere worth being.
Why it still matters now
What I’m left with, watching that concert thirty-odd years on, is this: the Disney songs that meant so much to me as a teenager and young adult resonated because they reflected exactly how I was feeling at the time, before I had any other way of naming it. If a song like Part of Your World ever felt like it was written about you, there’s a good chance it’s saying something about wanting to belong that your younger self hadn’t found the words for yet. That’s not a small thing. It’s worth listening to.
Watching Enchanted: Alan Menken’s Music for Disney at the Royal Albert Hall is what set off this whole train of thought.
A few questions this raises
Why do Disney songs like Part of Your World resonate so strongly with neurodivergent people? Because they put language and melody to a feeling that’s hard to describe directly: not belonging, wanting a different world, being close to people without feeling truly understood by them. For neurodivergent teenagers who can’t yet name what they’re experiencing, a well-written song can do the explaining for them.
What is rejection sensitivity, and how does it connect to feeling like you don’t belong? Rejection sensitivity is common in ADHD, and it means real or even imagined social rejection can feel intensely painful. Over time, that can make a young person expect to be left out or misunderstood before it’s even happened, which reinforces the feeling of not belonging even in situations where they’d actually be welcomed.
Is it too late to do the thing you talked yourself out of as a teenager? Not always, and not in the way you’d think. The point isn’t necessarily to go back and do that exact thing. It’s to notice, now, when you’re telling yourself a story that isn’t backed up by any facts, and to ask what you might be quietly ruling out because of it.
What’s the song that explained you before you could explain yourself? I’d love to hear about it, drop a comment or message us and let us know.
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