Experiment 1 - Open Letter to Fear
Part I – Proposal
This experiment aims to speak directly to fear in the form of an open letter, allowing me to convey my relationship and internal conflict with one of the biggest roadblocks in my life over the last six years. Throughout high school and college I continue catching myself hyper-analyzing the repercussions of anything new I want to delve into. While I found that this habit came with the benefit of keeping me – and by connection, my friends – from making unruly and rash decisions, I also noticed that my fears suppressed me from exploring new opportunities and communities that many others had entered without question. This open letter will focus on how fear has shaped me as a person and influenced my life both socially and academically. It will also tie into my changed, modern relationship with it, as I am currently at a time in my undergraduate career that I find myself pushing my boundaries and past what has previously stopped me in seeing through my goals. To emphasize this, I will conclude the letter by telling fear that I’m overcoming the barriers it has put up for me, thus allowing the letter to come full circle and resolve with a confident tone.
While the explicit audience of this letter will be fear itself, readers who also find themselves drawn from taking risks and holding back in anxiety of side effects will shape the implicit audience. As I share many of my personal sentiments towards fear and expose times I felt frozen and unable to move forward, I will speak about the counterbalancing thoughts I’ve had that allowed me to get over this roadblock. On a larger scale, everyone is in the conversation regarding how fear controls society as a whole. I believe much of the world is driven by fear, and while this is often for good reason and with good measure, getting over and taking risks despite these fears can be the most productive step in growing as a person.
Part II – Genre Analysis + Research
Researching the conventions of an open letter, it is clear there are two main forms that are distinguished based on who they are addressed to. The letter can either be completely unaddressed and simply intended to be read by a large number of people, or it can be addressed to a specific individual, however ultimately read by many who have some relevancy to the subject at hand. It is important not to lose sight of the audience and wander into a freeform type of communication, which is a common mistake made in open letters.
Narrowing down the audience, subject matter, and goals of the paper would be the first step towards writing a successful letter. More specifically, piecing apart, bullet-pointing, and prioritizing the components of the letter’s message will help organize the structure. In order to maintain a smooth flow in the letter and keep the tone cohesive, it is recommended that the first draft of the letter be written in one sitting. This will make it more impassioned, and while any grammar or spelling errors can easily be corrected shortly after, it is a good idea to distance oneself from the paper for a short period prior to making deeper and more analytical changes. Common pitfalls of open letters include using a preaching tone, wandering off from the main subject at hand, or aggressively attacking and thus alienating the reader with the content.
An example of an open letter ubiquitously considered both influential and effective would be the piece written by the survivor of the Stanford University rape case to her assaulter. While the stimulus for the letter is incredibly unfortunate, it’s cohesive structure, powerful tone, and profound takeaway message work to empower it. While she directly addresses Brock Turner in second person, she speaks anecdotally for long stretches and unravels her emotions at each step of the experience. Because of this, the letter becomes less centered around Turner himself, and much more about how he impacted the survivor and her message for her multiple implicit audiences. In her case, she is speaking to young men who have the potential of being in circumstances similar to Brock’s, young women like herself at risk for being in her position, and any bystanders mirroring her supporters throughout the traumatizing experience. She openly mentions these explicit audiences at her conclusions, even though she is speaking to the defendant directly. While the context and impact of this open letter is rather different from that of my intended piece, there is a lot to learn from how powerfully she channels emotions and successfully structures her letter.
Reading about the subject matter of fear, I found various psychology-based articles and blog posts discussing it as a primary motivator for many things we do. This often impacts how we treat other people, how much power we seek, and what we ultimately choose as a career. An article by Psychology Today argues that “…the top motivator is fear. It is such a strong driver of our behavior that it may also form the basis for every other motivator in our lives. Fear is a prime motivator because it is rooted in our childhood experiences, and it moves us subconsciously.” Having further investigated the mental background of fear, I am not surprised that I find it driving so many of my actions. I will also speak to how some of my fears are likely rooted in my childhood.
Additionally, an article by mindbodygreen.com describes various warning signs that fear is controlling one’s life. These include settling for less than what we truly want and deserve, shying away from risks by saying no when we internally mean yes, procrastinating, feeling paralyzed, and being overly controlling. Many of these points have been mirrored in my own actions and bring up great segues into talking points that expose my relationship with fear.
While many of these articles discuss fear in a detached and scientific way, this experiment will join the conversation by acting as a personal and reflective case study of my experiences. It will express way more emotion throughout the piece and present circumstances in which I felt fear had been driving my actions.
Part III – Sketch
Prior to discussing the order and structure of this open letter, I wanted to touch upon several fears that I will be highlighting in my open letter. While the most prominent is the fear of failure, others that often hinder me are those of being unprepared, making an unrepairable mistake, and not being satisfactory for the people who have given me all of the opportunities I have today. Throughout the letter I will be addressing fear directly in the second person and responding to the different emotions it has allowed me to feel.
The introduction of the open letter will speak to fear by outlining my general balance and mixture of feelings towards it. I aim to discuss possible sources of my childhood life that may have introduced and instigated certain fears into my life, leading into an example of how they have influenced me to date.
This next section will discuss how fear has helped me, yet transition into how it was simultaneously detrimental. While there is less passion behind the content I wish to discuss, I want to emphasize how valuable fear can be with its roots as a survival instinct. It has stopped me many times from making poor and unruly decisions, as well as given me the skill to help others make more logical and less emotional choices.
I will then proceed to talk about several cases in my life where fear has stopped me from living out my desires to the fullest and stunted my ability to make bold decisions. I found myself looking longingly at my bolder friends who didn’t allow mental blockages to stop them in their tracks, and naturally convinced myself that there was an innate reason why they were able to do these things I could not. I repeated these justifications so often to myself that they eventually became my reality.
The conclusion of the letter will be written in a mature and victorious tone as I have come to understand that fear is simply a mindset and not any all-empowering reality. Though I am far from the end of my battle with fear, I am pushing myself to take risks that I realize can be very rewarding and developmental. It is a major challenge to force ourselves to overstep this boundary so ingrained in our minds from early on, however this process can often be addicting in how much stepping outside of one’s comfort zone can bring.
Part IV – Sample
Dear Fear,
I tell myself to fall in love with the journey – to lose sight of the frivolities that steal joy from the moment. Though I’m weighed down by countless failed attempts at this self-help book prophecy, I have not yet given up. I am instead writing to ask – why, in search of my glorious journey, do I find you as the spilled coffee tainting the blueprints? Like the overly-flamboyant cousins I’m assigned to entertain during their annual visit, I’ve taken full ownership of you as my responsibility. Unlike these family members, however, you do not come for a long-weekend stay and then politely fly home across the country. Though I wish I could send you far abroad from my goals on a first-class seat, you linger around and make yourself known through both the simplest and most strenuous times. But while you are the overstuffed backpack always hanging on my shoulders, I can’t say your insides are all empty weight. I don’t criticize you for what you are, and I can’t say I hate you. I just think we need to talk.
My parents raised me to be a planner from my first day of kindergarten. They urged I triple check the supply list side-by-side with my backpack before sending me off to bed. After all, with the millions of unpredictable circumstances our lives throw at us, we might as well know which pocket we hid the 50-pack of Crayons in. I never questioned this habit of being exponentially prepared. It wasn’t until several years into practice, I realized that there was a crack in the system. What happens when minutes into a frenzied search, I can’t find the Crayons? Do I ask someone to kindly share with me? Do I tell the teacher? How do I adapt?
I cannot say I automatically recognized you in these early qualms of mine, but it wasn’t long before I connected the dots. Having this framework engrained in my mind early on, I grew apprehensive of jumping into new ideas without doing my research. With each scribbled pros-and-cons list and mental cost-benefit analysis, my mind instinctively plastered question marks at the slightest hiccups I found. This segued into my reputation for giving the rational advice attributed exclusively to parents. Like I often did to myself, I helped those close to me reason their thoughts and draw away emotions that could land them in unfavorable situations. While some may call this a precocious or mature method of reason – one I cannot deny has helped me professionally – I’ve come to realize I may have thrown away my childish instinct of exploration far too early. Driven by my fear of finding myself even remotely unprepared, I not only avoided potentially dangerous and unruly situations, but also tossed aside dozens of opportunities for growth outside of my comfort zone. Fear – thank you for your help, but couldn’t you have waited?
Part V – Reflection
I chose to write the first half of my open letter to fear as I felt that a lot of my later sentiments required a deeper understanding of how I was raised, and how I operate as an individual. Throughout the process of completing my sample, I discovered trains of thought and emotions in my reflection process that resulted in being far more prominently featured than originally planned. Particularly, this came about in choosing the specific examples and anecdotes that I would bring to the story to illustrate the origins of my mindset. I found insights in both my actions and in elements of my childhood that helped explain my current struggle and dilemmas with fear.
I was surprised at how challenging it was to continuously engage my explicit audience of fear, as I would get carried away in explaining and reflecting on plotlines and feel that the audience didn’t really need a presence. Knowing that this is a key element of open letters, however, I found room to address fear in the second person and reveal its growing relevance throughout the piece (fear would be the most heavily addressed towards the second half of the letter). Another tribulation in working on this sample came about in finding a logical order to fit together the different pieces of my story. The existing segments could fit together in various ways, so finding the smoothest transitions between them took several efforts before I felt it made sense. I know that if I were to proceed with finalizing this piece, I would have to carefully plan how I want the structure to flow.
I am very glad that I had the opportunity to explore my internal conflict with fear throughout this experiment. Despite the challenges, because of how personal my reflections were, I made discoveries in the process of completing these steps are very applicable to my other two experiments. I look forward to bridging some of these themes in both the poem and photo essay I will complete.