Hoooooo boy.

This one was a doozy.

I don’t know exactly where to start with this unit. It was a lot for me to take in, and I’m not really sure how to talk about it, so I guess I’ll just be honest with my feelings on the internet. That’s always a good idea.

This unit involved the concept of fear, the history surrounding the cold war, and, well, a whole lot of other stuff. With this, we were to create a video to answer this question: How does fear affect behavior?

Part of me feels like I lived the answer. Since I was a small child, I have dealt with a pretty big fear of natural disasters, global warming, war, bombs, black holes, asteroids, and pretty much anything that had the power to end the world. I’ve always been deathly afraid of the end of the world. Of course, our unit focusing on fear during the cold war all revolved around that topic. My anxiety got really bad, the worst it’s ever been. There was an entire weekend where I walked up and down the street all day, counting my steps because I couldn’t stand the thought of thinking about the reasons I was so afraid. Trump had just gotten into office, and the whole world seemed mad at each other (they still are, but I’m better at ignoring it now). While studying the cold war and looking at current events, I couldn’t help but see the parallels.

I learned a lot about how fear affects behavior in those few months.

Fear can stop you from going to class.

Fear can stop you from getting out of bed.

Fear can make you delete Facebook because you can’t stand to see a news article.

Fear can completely control your life.

Although you can’t let that happen. If you let fear completely take over your brain, you’re barely a person anymore. You become a shaking ball of anxiety that doesn’t have a life quality over that of a mollusk. That’s not okay. Which is why I forced myself to get better and calm down. Of course, it wasn’t as easy as that sentence made it sound, but I’m okay now. That’s really all that matters.

After I got over that minor (major) hiccup, I had to focus on putting that to words, and to video. I wrote an essay, then re-wrote it, and I’m still not really sure if I re-wrote it better or worse because I don’t thin I got feedback the second time, but that’s okay. I’m pretty sure it got better. I’ll attach my final essay below.

Finally, I had to put it to video. I did my video twice, just like my essay, because my first video was kind of lame and also I decided to switch to using Final Cut Pro on my laptop instead of continuing with iMovie because iMovie and I have a long and complicated history and I no longer trust it. I’m not really sure what to say about making this video.

It’s not like it was super challenging. It was pretty time-consuming. I worked on it for many hours, over many days.

I’m tired. Here’s the end result.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hLxapP1D8FU