As an immigrant schoolteacher involved in scholarly work, I often feel like an outsider in academic communities. The idea of contributing to the social sciences isn't something I find especially meaningful to pursue, as my deepest concern is the pursuit of human flourishing through a critical lens on lived reality. It took me over a decade (2010–2022) to enter a PhD program, and during that time, I began writing and experimenting with my poetics of living to theorize transnational experiences. Through the interplay of language and form, poetry as praxis gives voice to an invisible pain—one that neither seeks nor relies on being understood. It is in this poetic space that creative imagination finds the courage to speak. To intuit emotional truth, I've come to realize that clarity emerges through the heart. And now, here lies a truth—my secret, a very simple secret: I enact a rejection of closure.
Dave Yan (Wed,) studied this question.