I recently received a message from a student. It was heavy with that familiar, suffocating weight we’ve been taught to call “Imposter Syndrome.” They were struggling with their literature review, paralysed by the requirement to prove their “originality” and “original contribution” to decades of major academic work, while simultaneously feeling like a fraud who hadn’t read enough, thought enough, or been enough to merit a seat at the table.
I remained at my standing desk to reply, where my body hummed with the specific, inflammatory static that comes with a Lupus flare - a sensation like my nervous system is trying to broadcast on a frequency that doesn’t exist. In that moment, the Imposter didn’t feel like a psychological quirk. It felt like a physical encounter with a wall. I realised I couldn’t give the standard, Hallmark-card advice. I couldn’t tell them to “read more,” or that it will “all come together” (like magic), or to “just believe in themselves.” To do so would be to lie.
Because Imposter Syndrome isn’t a bug in the student’s software. It’s a feature of the Ivory Town.
We often talk about the “Ivory Tower,” but that implies a single, lonely spire - a Rapunzel-like isolation. I prefer the Ivory Town. It is a gated community. It has its own dialect, its own shibboleths, its own strictly enforced borders, and, most crucially, its own Homeowners Association or Property Management Company that decides whose “originality” looks like a manicured lawn and whose looks like a weed.
(Sidenote: Dandelions are the most wonderful plants and flowers. They are resilient, bright, and refuse to stay within the lines.)
Imposter syndrome is the feeling of being an undocumented resident in this town. It thrives on In-Groups and Out-Groups. Academia, in its traditional form, is built on the “Master-Apprentice” model, which is fundamentally a model of exclusion. You are “out” until someone with a key - a supervisor, a reviewer, a committee - decides you are “in.” The Old Boys Network we pretend has gone features this very kinship at its core.
When we feel like impostors, we are actually sensing the very real walls built to keep the “unrefined riff-raff” out. If you are neurodivergent, if you have caring roles, if you are chronically ill, if you are from a background that doesn’t mirror the Town’s Founding Fathers, those walls aren’t just metaphorical. They are architectural. They are the gaskets that keep the pressure high and the entrance narrow. We feel like frauds not because we lack knowledge, but because we lack the perfume of the in-group. We haven’t learned the “hidden tropes” of how to stand, how to speak without stuttering, or how to work for twelve hours straight without our bodies revolting.
The literature review is usually presented to students as a Goliath they must slay to prove they have an “original idea.”
Quite the gauntlet; at 45 and nearly three decades into an academic career, I’m not sure I’ve had an original idea, yet.
And, this is a lie that breeds paralysis. In the Ivory Town, “originality” is often used as a gatekeeping tool - a way of saying, “Unless you can say something no one has ever said in the history of everyone, you don’t belong here.”
But what if we reframed the literature review? What if we stripped away the “originality” requirement and replaced it with Belonging?
The literature review is not a test of your genius; it is an exercise in finding your place.
Think of The Literature not as a mountain of books you must conquer, but as a crowded, centuries-old dinner party in a house with too many rooms. Your job must NOT be to walk in and silence the room with a revolutionary proclamation. (Oh, Mary Wollstonecraft, we need you!) Your job is to wander through the halls, listen to the conversations happening in the corners, and find the group that is talking about what you care about. Once you find them, you pull up a chair. You don’t have to be better than them. You just have to say:
“I’ve been listening to you all talk about [X], and from where I’m standing - with my specific neurodiverse brain and my specific lived history - it looks a bit different. Can I add this to the map?”
You are NOT proving you’re the best; you’re locating your coordinates. You are finding your connection.
To understand these hidden tropes, I’ve been returning to Han Yujoo’s The Impossible Fairytale. It is a book that refuses to behave. It begins as a story about two children - the “Child” (a model of compliance) and the “Mia” (the outsider) - but it eventually fractures into a meta-critique of the author’s own power to create and destroy.
Yujoo plays with what we might call hidden and unhidden tropes. The unhidden trope is the student who works hard and succeeds - the hero’s journey of the PhD. But the hidden trope is the structural violence that requires the child to be “normal” to be seen. In Yujoo’s world, the narrative itself is a trap. The characters feel like impostors in their own story because the rules of the story were written by an invisible hand that doesn’t care for their survival.
When you sit down to write a literature review, you are essentially trying to write yourself into a Fairytale that was often designed to exclude you. You are looking for your face in a mirror that has been tilted to reflect only a very specific, sanitised type of scholar. Han Yujoo reminds us that when the story feels impossible, it’s often because the tropes are working against us. We are trying to fit into a hidden architecture of what a “good student” looks like, and the friction we feel is the sound of our real selves scraping against the rigid cardboard cutouts of the Ivory Town.
I often reflect with my students that forcing oneself to model a literature review as solely ‘original work’ is like giving yourself a thousand papercuts. It is a slow, stinging attrition of the soul. But the goal shouldn’t be to bleed for the sake of a mythic, solitary breakthrough; it should be the relief of a homecoming. Your task is to find the conversation that finally makes you feel a little less like an imposter and a little more like you have found a place where you belong.
This brings us to the most volatile relationship in the Ivory Town: Supervision. In a neurotypical, able-bodied framework, supervision is a transaction of output and milestones. But for those of us navigating the world with neurodiversity and chronic illness, supervision is a negotiation of nervous systems. When a supervisor meets a student, they are either providing a holding space or a pressure cooker. Imposter syndrome skyrockets when a student’s basic needs for clarity, sensory safety, or physical pacing are unmet.
The Neurodiverse Friction: If your supervisor expects a “linear” progression and your brain works in rhizomatic, non-linear bursts of hyperfocus followed by fallow periods, you will feel like a failure. It’s ok, you aren’t failing; you are simply working in a different temporal architecture.
The Chronic Friction: If your supervisor doesn’t understand that a health flare is not a choice but a systemic shutdown, they will read your unproductivity as a lack of discipline. Glurk. We need to stop asking IF the student is good enough and start asking if the supervision is expansive enough to hold a body and brain that doesn’t fit the standard academic mould. Supervision should be the art of helping the student find AND hold their place, not training them to be a better gatekeeper of their own misery.
Living at the intersection of neurodivergence and chronic illness means my work looks nothing like the Ivory Town’s brochures. I live in what disability theorists call “Crip Time.” Lupus requires me to treat my energy like a finite currency in a high-inflation economy. Sometimes, though my brain tells me to, I cannot grind. If I push through a hidden trope of academic stamina, my body will bankrupt me for a week. This is unfair to me, and especially to my loved ones.
Neurodiversity means my focus is a wild horse - either it’s galloping at 100mph through a sea of tabs, or it’s refusing to leave the stable because the “vibe” of the room is slightly off.
Sidenote: This is NOT a superpower.
Organising work in this state isn’t about Time Management Hacks; it’s about Energy and Interest Management. My originality comes from the very fact that I see the world through the lens of friction. The Ivory Town hates friction. It wants smooth excellence. But the most profound insights come from the glitches - the moments where our bodies or brains refuse to comply. When I cannot organise my ideas into a spreadsheet, I organise them in a constellation. (Oh, how I loathe spreadsheets. Joy suckers!)
This concept of finding your place extends far beyond the PhD. We spend our days asking: Do I fit in this relationship? Do I fit in this version of parenthood? Do I fit in this family?
If the Ivory Town is a gated community of the mind, the home can often become a Panopticon of the spirit. When we talk about finding our place in the “literature” of a relationship/home/family, we are often doing so under the gaze of a domestic supervisor who may prioritise compliance over growth. In the classroom, I tell my students that the literature review is about connection. But as I read Bae Suah’s fiction, Untold Night and Day, I am reminded that for many, the home is less a place of connection and more a landscape of ‘invisible borders.’
When you are navigating a Lupus flare or a neurodiverse brain within a rigid domestic architecture, the environment itself can feel like a bear trap. It requires a form of Radical Cartography - a constant mapping of the ‘hidden tropes’ of the household. Here, you are navigating the heavy, electric friction of a space that refuses to hold your specific frequency, turning the act of simply existing into a high-stakes negotiation of place.
In Bae Suah’s tale, the boundaries between work, memory, and physical reality dissolve. There is a specific kind of exhaustion in Suah’s prose; the exhaustion of someone being “re-written” by their environment. She explores the unhidden trope of the quiet presence, but the hidden trope is the internal erasure.
When you spend time in an environment that uses its “place” to crowd out yours, you begin to feel like a shadow in your own hallway. In this literary architecture, the fatigue of the body is often cited as evidence of ‘failure.’ It is a form of internal gatekeeping where an obsession with order is used to crowd out the validity of the Rhizomatic student/partner/friend/parent/colleague. We are left navigating a place that feels like a bibliography we didn’t write, where our specific resonance is treated as an error in the text. But Bae Suah suggests the true reality isn’t the one being shouted; it’s the one whispered in the gaps.
In the architecture of the Ivory Town, we frequently encounter the ‘Closed System’ - one that resists new data to maintain a rigid homeostasis. As a Professor, I see this manifested in “Standardised Methodology,” where only one narrative of “excellence” is permitted.
Reclaiming Ontological Sovereignty in the classroom - and in the home - is a radical act. It is the realisation that your ‘place’ (your frequency, your rhythm) is a distinct existential territory. In the “literature” of the Academy, we see two conflicting geographies:
The Traditionalist Map: Defined by the Master-Apprentice model - focusing on linear control and “smooth,” predictable excellence. This is the spreadsheet's logic: it maintains the status quo but cannot account for the glitch or the flare.
The Pedagogical Rhizome: This is where I find my own place. It is the scholar who turns a Tuesday morning into a hyper-focused deep-dive into a single footnote, ignoring the “hidden trope” of the tidy syllabus in favour of the “unhidden truth” of a student’s curiosity, or a random experience and conversation shared from the morning’s coffee run.
As a Professor, my role is to act as a curator for these different ways of knowing. The traditionalist system often tries to “find its place” by absorbing or “editing” the rhizomatic voices. It tries to tell the neurodivergent student that their thinking is an “error,” or the chronically ill researcher that their “fallow” periods are a lack of discipline.
But my work is about proving that these systems can exist in parallel without one needing to colonise the other. They need to find their own place, and we must find ours. One does not need to justify oneself to the other. We are building a library where every volume is bound differently, and every voice is allowed its own specific, un-edited resonance.
If the literature review is about finding your “kin,” then your kin aren’t the ones telling you that you’re a “fraud” for needing a nap or a sensory-quiet room. Your kin are those who understand that reality is a thin veil over a pulsating interior life.
To my student, and to myself: The edit is yours. You are not a “bad” parent or scholar for having a different resonance. You are a specific instrument. The Ivory Town (and the Domestic Panopticon) wants every instrument to be a drum, beating a compliant rhythm. But you are a cello-deep, resonant, and requiring a different kind of tuning. They cannot occupy your place because they don’t have your frequency.
In Untold Night and Day, there is a recurring motif of a room that might or might not exist. We all have that room. It is the place where our brain feels safe to wander without a “supervisor” barking for results; where our heavy limbs can finally feel light.
Finding your place in the literature - and within the complex architecture of a professional and home life - is about realising that the inner sanctum of your creativity does not require the permission of the external critic to exist. It is a place of Intellectual Sanctuary. You can teach from there. You can write from there. You can exist from there.
The rigid, standard narrative has its own place. It occupies a room built of strict shibboleths and narrow gates. We can acknowledge its existence without letting it occupy our internal territory. You have your own sovereign interior. It is a space where the health-flare and the brain-glitch are not “errors,” but the very ink with which we write our history.
We don’t need to invite the rigid logic of the “Master” into that room. We can simply close the internal door and allow our own frequency to resonate, undisturbed.
To my student, and to anyone feeling like a fraud: You are not an imposter. You are a person with a specific set of coordinates in a Town that was built for someone else.
Stop trying to prove you are “the best.” The Ivory Town is starving for authentic people. Start looking for your “where.”
Where does your neurodivergence find resonance?
Where does your body find rest?
Where do your ideas find a home that doesn’t require you to apologise for your existence?
The Ivory Town only has power as long as we believe its walls are real. Once you realise the “literature” is just a long, messy, human conversation, you realise you’ve always had a seat at the table.
Pull up a chair. We’ve been waiting for your perspective.
To deepen the conversation around the “Ivory Town,” Crip Time, and the architectures of belonging, I’ve curated a bibliography of kin. These resources explore the “hidden tropes” we often trip over and offer new maps for navigating our own frequencies.
Han Yujoo, The Impossible Fairytale (2017): A chilling exploration of the “unhidden tropes” of childhood and the meta-fictional power of the narrator. Essential for understanding how the “rules of the story” can become a trap.
Bae Suah, Untold Night and Day (2020): A novel that moves in a recursive, dream-like state, perfectly capturing the exhaustion of being “re-written” by one’s environment. A masterful study of internal erasure and the “Silent Room.”
Alison Kafer, Feminist, Queer, Crip (2013): Kafer’s work on “Crip Time” is the foundational text for understanding how disability and chronic illness (like Lupus) require a complete reimagining of futurity and productivity. Please message me if you need access to a copy of this article.
Ellen Samuels, “Six Ways of Looking at Crip Time”: A moving and accessible essay that explores the fluctuating temporality of the sick body. It reframes the “fallow” period not as a failure, but as a specific mode of being.
Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (1980): Specifically, the Introduction: Rhizome. This is the primary text for understanding the difference between the “Tree” (the rigid, hierarchical Ivory Town) and the “Rhizome” (the non-linear, interconnected way the AuDHD brain maps the world).
The Theory of Monotropism: Developed by autistic researchers (Murray, Lesser, and Lawson), this theory explains the “wild horse” focus of the AuDHD mind. It reframes “attention deficits” as a “monotropic interest system” - a hyper-focused, deep-dive frequency that is an original mode of structure.
Resource: Monotropism.org
The “Slow Scholarship” Movement: A collection of academic work (see The Slow Professor by Berg and Seeber) that critiques the “smooth excellence” and “grind culture” of the Ivory Town. It advocates for the right to think and parent in “fallow” time.
Zoe Todd, “An Indigenous Feminist’s Take on the Ontological Turn”: Rooted in Indigenous studies, Todd’s work on “Ontological Sovereignty” is a vital resource for anyone fighting to protect their own “frequency” from being colonised by a dominant, closed system.
Instead of a spreadsheet, I invite you to explore Mind Mapping or Rhizomatic Journaling.
Tool: Obsidian or Scrivener are excellent for those who find spreadsheets a joy-sucker. They allow you to link ideas in a constellation rather than a linear list, honouring the non-linear glitch as a structural insight.
A Note on Kinship: If you are currently navigating a “Closed System” (institutional or domestic), these texts are not just “reading material” - they are proof that your frequency exists in the literature. You are not writing from a vacuum; you are part of a long, brave lineage of cellos in a world of drums.
Which “hidden trope” of the Ivory Town (or the home) do you find yourself tripping over most often?
If your work/parenting/life were a constellation instead of a spreadsheet, what would be the brightest star right now?
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