I suppose it started as early as kindergarten, reading Dr. Seuss books and bouncing along to their rhythm as a mechanism to carry the path of a story. Children’s books can be quite simplistic at first sight, but multiple Dr. Seuss books have found real success in the form of feature-length films, without too much additional content. Here, I found myself enamored with literature as a whole. Partly because my parents were gatekeepers of the television, and literature was a form of entertainment with no time limits, but also because of this transformative experience of walking through a story as if dancing to a song. It sounds cheesier than it is, as most things about childhood do in hindsight. No five-year-old is sitting on the alphabet mat considering a career as a poet because of a few lines of Green Eggs and Ham, but the adult that child grows into might find that that moment changed some things.

I used to think I was one for literature more than poetry. Full form books with fleshed out characters and plots and the full spectrum of human emotion stitched into the very fabric of the pages. So for a while I tried to write novels, short stories, and the occasional essay. I found that my short stories would be missing a chunk in the middle, some piece of development that I found too tedious to flesh out in that moment. My novels would sit in a folder, untouched after Chapter 2, for years and years. Until I re-read them, decided they were garbage, and re-wrote those same 2 chapters. I still appreciated poetry, from the works of Sylvia Plath to Emily Dickinson, often reminded of the profound impact those women had on my development when I read their works in high school. I just thought, it was something I enjoyed as an experience, not something I wanted to create myself.

Then I met a woman who I never expected. Her name was Esther Greenwood, and she told me the story of her life. It was a novel that captured my attention for the first few chapters, and quickly lost it until I found myself reading articles about the author and hungered to decode her life. In the form of The Bell Jar, and through the eyes of the fictional Esther Greenwood, I met Sylvia Plath through a new lens. A woman who wanted to create something from scratch and had worked her whole life, just to find herself rushing through a novel desperate to keep her finances afloat. Pulling from pieces of her most traumatic memories, and using the type of descriptive language I was only used to hearing in poetry and song, she unveiled the mysteries of one of the most tragic times of her life. She lifted the metaphorical bell jar, and she showed me that poetry may have been a format I overlooked for many years.

Tossing and turning on a weekday night, I found myself picturing the ebb and flow of an ocean, the smooth surface of a stone, the spot as small as the point of a needle that itched on my foot. And I grabbed my iPad and began to scribble things down. I produced that night, one of the most ridiculous, cheesy, and frankly embarrassing pieces of literature to ever come from my fingertips. And somehow, it was beautiful to me. Since that night, I have written a handful of poems and published them on my Instagram account @paper.cut.poems with a sprawling audience of my own friends and family, eager to support me.

I come to you today, a mediocre, part-time, hobbyist of a poet, eager to share my work and reconnect with the joy I once felt in my high school English class. My career as a scientist has brought me great fulfillment, but I am hopeful that this new endeavor will bring me catharsis in some form. So here is my too-long ramble asking anyone who will listen, hear me scream and cry and roar. Let me show you the ink that flows through my veins as it spills out from every paper cut. Help me release my voice into the ether, and if it falls on only deaf ears, let me bask in the relief of putting things down in text.