The Haunted House of Academia

i lived in a house where the floors creaked with fear

where the walls remembered every footstep that dared not misstep

it smelled of old books and new insecurities

of burned-out candles at tenure-track altars

a house where ghosts were not studied but served

haunted because nothing truly lives

"almost there - but not quite"

a phrase repeated like a ritual

a demand for smoothness

a punishment for difference

a mirror reflecting the fear that something in the room cannot be made theirs

inside, people follow forms like scripture

out of fear of what happens if they don't

the right tone

the right sources

the right distance from the body

everything shaped for predictability

all for safety (whose safety?)

a performance dressed in white

wrapped in the language of universalism

but always centered on the particular tastes of the powerful

English becomes the contract

not just a language but a condition

a way of asking: can this be made accessible to us? (who is us?)

this is not a gap in comprehension

it's a system of entitlement

a belief

absurd and unexamined

that all knowledge, from every world, should converge into something linear, transparent, and digestible

that only what fits this shape deserves to be called knowledge

double consciousness is not a wound carried by the colonized

it is the anxious projection of empire

the colonizer's panic

when faced with what cannot be owned

the insistence on being the audience

the assumption that the work is incomplete if they cannot find themselves inside it

keep inserting themselves, uninvited,

carrying the violence of always needing to be centered

and reacting with injury when the center is elsewhere

the more legible I became,

the more I disappointed myself

my thoughts no longer mine

my language no longer free

legibility used as a blade

to strip, to smooth, to silence

clarity (whose clarity?) becomes the cage

what they call mentorship is inheritance

advising becomes enforcement

peer review becomes filtration

a lineage mistaken for care

but built on fear

a trauma so polished no one dares name it

be publishable, but not in your own voice

be radical, but palatable

be yourself, but make it legible

this house has no room for what cannot be domesticated

its hallways echo with decisions made in fear

fear of unpredictability, of difference, of failure, of joy

i watched brilliant people become shadows

trading tenderness for tenure

trading truth for job security

trading life for a place at the table

only to be told they should be grateful to be seated at all And now, even ChatGPT terrifies them

not because it threatens truth

but because it threatens exclusivity

it dismantles the illusion that knowledge must pass through gatekeepers to become real

their careful architecture, built to reward difficulty and deny access, is beginning to fall apart

so I left

not to prove anything

not to win

not even to be free

but to remember

what it feels like to write without translating

think without trimming

be unreadable without shame

return to the places where knowledge still breathes

let the house remain haunted

let it echo with what it refused to hold

let what was almost there remain unfinished

alive in its refusal to be resolved