Nonfiction Project (Fear)

Fear is a complex subject. It is different to every person that you will speak to and each of these people will be afraid of something different. The project that Jillianne Hovland and I conducted, had a goal to discover and learn more about the secrets of fear and how fear effects people differently.

Together, we tackled the broad subject by learning about how stories effect different people. We interviewed Bob Gasch, who is a storyteller in our area, to learn about fear and surprise that he uses in his stories.  This is the interview that started our story; it gave us an excellent base to begin further research.

Continuing in the process of creating this project, we looked at different websites that focused solely on fear and how to understand it. What we took out of this is that there are two main types of fear but it all serves the same purpose; the purpose of the feeling of fear and its emotions is to keep us out of danger and harm.

The next step in forming our project was by far the most difficult. It required us to interview many different people on their fears and how they effect them physically, mentally, and emotionally. After each interview, a conclusion was drawn about fear. Every time we had an interview, the conclusion had very similar characteristics about their reactions to fear, but there were very many that had no resemblance of each other whatsoever.

Most people felt a pit or a drop in their stomach when their fear was brought into play. People who's fear was taken by surprise felt the fear a different way than those who put themselves into the situation. The surprised cases became nervous and developed a fear that has lasted for many years. People who were expecting the situation, described their feelings as a "huge adrenaline rush", and even an "adrenaline high". They liked what they were feeling.

I hope that when people listen to the podcast, they take out that fear is different to everybody. You cannot judge somebody because of what they are afraid of because everybody is afraid of something. I would also hope that people would be better informed of what they are feeling and how that it effects their body and their emotions.

During the creation of this project, I have not only learned more than I expected to, but I have discovered more things about different people. I now know why I like to watch a scary movie or go on a roller-coaster that may make me sick. This project forced me to pursue one topic and learn as much as I could about it. I accomplished what I wanted to discover about fear.