Origin

A response to a prompt by Alex Dawson, and a little catchup...

The Poem

Since my youth, I sought to understand the world;
how it works, why it works, and where I fit.

First I sought to do this pragmatically,
using equations and symbols

that would turn most people's heads into tops.
I was gifted in this area, but inside, I felt a nagging:

first, a quiet nudge,
later, a desperate scream,

informing me that
"equations aren't the full story. Come back to reality, before you succumb to madness."

I managed to do so,
with only a handful of grains of sand left to fall in my brain's hourglass.

I then turned to poetry and writing,
realizing that imagery of myself

with a bright, yet fragile mind,
was the way towards understanding.

Reflection

This poem was born from a prompt posted by Alex Dawson. She, along with a bunch of other poets, celebrated April by participating in National Poetry Writing Month (NaPoWriMo), which involves writing a poem a day over the course of April. In addition, prompts were created and posted in 4 day batches. The final day had a very interesting prompt: write a poem about your poet origin story.

Her response is here:

What inspired me to write this poem was not this, but rather valeria eden’s attempt at this prompt (which you can find on Instagram).

I then wondered about how I would go about writing this poem. Quite quickly I recalled a conversation I had on Threads last week with another creative, Kendall Wisniewski. She posed a few questions:

• What did you want to be when you grew up, when you were a preteen/teenager?

• What do you do for a living nowadays?

• On a scale from 1-10, how fulfilled do you find yourself these days?

For a long time, I wanted to be a physicist. This ideal took hold in middle school (I think?) shortly after I read the Stephen Hawking book A Briefer History of Time. I found his way of explaining complex phenomena in the universe fascinating, and it nudged me to follow a similar path to him. I wanted to understand how the universe works.

This, of course, required me to learn a lot of math, another thing that I excelled at. Over the course of my studies, I learned about a lot of equations that most people would likely never use in their life. Those equations govern various phenomena in the universe.

However, there lies a problem. That problem is that as I went further and further into my studies, I felt less and less connected to actual reality. Like, learning all of this is great, but how do I tie this back to something that makes a difference in this world?

Furthermore, as I’ve mentioned in the past, the research aspect of my physics education was burning me out, despite me enjoying the learning aspect and the teaching aspect (the teaching aspect was mentioned in my Threads conversation as something I’ve missed). Had I attempted to continue, that burnout period would have lasted far longer.

One thing that still remains is the desire to understand - particularly, I want to understand how the world works, why it works the way it does, and where do I fall in it. Writing poetry and prose, in a sense, tries to do this, albeit in a different way than how physics tries to do it. Physics uses equations to explain everything, whereas in writing you are sort of forced to think outside the box, and think about all the different connections one can make between different objects¹. That, I think, was the true catalyst for me to write poetry.

A Little Catchup…

Apart from the Imperfect Singers post at the beginning of the month of April, I’ve been mostly silent here. You might find that somewhat unusual, considering that April is also Autism Awareness Month, and thus I would have some content to share regarding it. I suppose I touched upon it a bit in the poem with the idea of burnout, but other than that, it’s been silence².

So, I should tell you about a couple of things, which include making some progress towards goals that I set for myself in 2025.

The most notable thing is that I’ve signed up for a half marathon, which will occur on Saturday. I had hoped to accomplish this last year, but I could not get the logistics squared away.

The second thing is that I’ve booked an appointment to get a sunflower tattoo, which is meant to symbolize my commitment to the Hidden Disability Sunflower program, and the fact that sunflowers are my favorite type of flower.

Finally, I’ve been chipping away at the Stafford Challenge. The Stafford Challenge involves writing a poem a day for a whole year. Basically, it’s like NaPoWriMo, but expanded for an entire year. So far, I written at least one poem a day since January 17, save for February 12. During this challenge, I’ve played around with various forms, such as haiku, tanka, and shadorma, and I have taken part in a number of challenges. I have even submitted a poem for potential publication in Poetic Reveries’ August 2026 issue of their digital magazine.

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1. I recall in some of my physics courses (particularly the first semester of graduate level electromagnetism) that we were encouraged to think outside the box in order to come up with the right answer, instead of trying to brute force the answer using equations.

2. If you are looking for some interesting content written during Autism Awareness Month, I would recommend taking a look at The Cognitive Ecologist's Transformative Education series (note, most articles are behind the paywall).