Human Experience 02: Fear

Here’s the thing: “Love” is what we were born with, but “Fear” is what we’ve learned since birth. Anonymously, people from all walks of life, experiences, and perceptions submitted pieces of creative writing from poetry to short story to free style to short plays, trying to tackle their own personal definition of the word “Fear.”

The Human Experience is meant to be an exploratory form of documentary theatre that asks us to define words that belong to all of us but mean something different to each of us. It is intended to inspire personal confessions through creative writing outlets in order to reveal troubling or hilarious secrets, transgressions, and experiences that hold the mirror up to nature and remind us of our shared humanity.

The word selected for each episode should trigger something in us that evokes a human response while creating an atmosphere of conversation, which was something we learned was most successful about the first Episode: that this series is meant to feel like a conversation. Whether you’re running through the park while listening to this, or cleaning your house, or on a road trip, or even just lying in bed waiting to fall asleep, this series is geared to remind you that you are not alone. There are other human beings who feel the same as you, who suffer or pick themselves off the ground, the same as you. And this series is a theatrically workshopped forum that attempts to give shape to the human conversation.

There are so many words at the tips of our tongues. But we here at Chatterbox do our best to select the one that talks about right now, the time in which we are all experiencing — and how does that inform the conversation? Who knows which word the next episode of The Human Experience will feature: Leadership? Refuge? Equality? Life?

Only Connect,

—Kyle Hatley