A Hero’s Journey, But It’s Just Me Getting Out of Bed

There are days when getting out of bed feels like climbing Mount Everest.

Not literally — no frostbitten fingers, no oxygen tanks, no Sherpa watching me cry because my sock seam feels “wrong.” But emotionally? It’s the same mountain. And the worst part? I can see the summit. It’s right there. The summit is: Stand up. Walk downstairs. And yet my brain acts like I’m gearing up for a National Geographic documentary.

People say things like “Just put your feet on the floor!” with the same confidence of someone telling you the secret to losing weight is “Just eat less.” If it were that easy, Karen, I wouldn’t be lying here calculating whether I have the energy to blink.

I wish I could be one of those people who wakes up, stretches, springs out of bed, and decides it’s a great day to go for a jog or scrub baseboards or alphabetize the spice rack.

Meanwhile I’m over here negotiating with myself like:

“If you get up now, you can sit on the couch instead.”

“If you walk to the kitchen, you don’t even have to cook — just vibe in front of the fridge like a sad little goblin.”

“If you check the mailbox, there’s a 1% chance it’s not bad news.”

There’s this invisible weight that sits on my chest some mornings — the kind of heavy that isn’t dramatic enough to write about in a medical journal but is absolutely heavy enough to keep me from standing up. It’s not laziness. It’s not lack of motivation. It’s not “needing a better morning routine” (thanks, reels).

It’s mental illness.

It’s exhaustion that sleep doesn’t fix.

It’s depression creeping in like a fog machine at a middle-school dance.

It’s anxiety whispering, “Don’t move, something might go wrong.”

It’s trauma saying, “You’re safer here.”

And yet — I still want to be the person who can just will themselves into action. I want to be the person who throws on shoes and checks the mailbox without giving themselves an internal TED Talk about perseverance. I want to be the person whose brain doesn’t turn a simple task into a death-defying expedition.

But here’s the thing I’m slowly learning:

Getting out of bed is climbing Mount Everest for some of us.

That doesn’t make us weak.

It just means we’re hiking a different mountain.

And on the days I finally swing my legs over the edge of the mattress, stand up, and take even five steps?

That’s my summit. That’s my flag at the top. That’s my “Hey, look, Ma, I made it!”

Some people climb Everest for bragging rights.

Some of us climb it just to get to the couch.

Both are victories.

The Thesis That Never Was: Christopher Pike, Twilight, and the Year My Advisor Was a Piece of Shit

Back in 2011, the biggest academic question on my mind wasn’t Shakespeare, or Milton, or whatever canonical old white guy we were supposed to be fawning over in grad school. It was this:

Why has no one ever compared Christopher Pike’s Last Vampire series to Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight through a feminist lens?

And I don’t mean casually compared — I mean deeply, academically, unapologetically.
Like:
Sita vs. Bella. Female autonomy vs. female self-erasure. Ancient, ruthless agency vs. sparkly abstinence metaphors.

My brain eats pop culture for breakfast, and in my teens I was a hardcore Christopher Pike fan. So when it came time to choose a thesis topic — literally ANY thesis topic in the entire world — my manic little grad-student brain lit up like a Christmas tree. Suddenly I could see it:

A thesis that challenged, analyzed, subverted, questioned womanhood, monstrosity, power, and desire in YA vampire lit.

It was bold.
It was original.
It was academically juicy.
It was… honestly GOLD.

And then—

my advisor was a piece of shit (but dressed in a blazer with elbow patches to throw people off).

There’s really no softer way to say it. The man (or woman — but let’s be honest, it was definitely a man) managed to squash that spark with the precision of someone who was far more skilled at extinguishing ideas than nurturing them.. 

So the world never got my Christopher Pike vs. Twilight analysis.
The world never saw the feminist argument that lived in my head like a feral cat scratching at the wallpaper.
And honestly? I still think about it.

Because here’s the thing: I had something.
Something smart, weird, fresh, and genuinely worth saying.

And every time someone gushes over vampire feminism discourse — the Buffy takes, the Sookie Stackhouse takes, the endless Dracula re-re-re-interpretations — I think, Y’all don’t even know. You missed the Pike angle. The Sita reclamation arc. The contrast with Bella’s passive self-sacrifice.

We could have had it all.

I could have been the bitch who wrote that thesis.

But instead, I ended up with a graduate-school trauma origin story and a really good excuse to write a future blog post titled, “My Year at WIU: The Academic Horror Story Nobody Asked For.” And just when you’d think the experience couldn’t get more absurd, my advisor — a flaming, self-interested, ego-inflated dumpster fire of a human being with the shamelessness of a raccoon chewing through drywall — had the audacity to ask to be on my thesis panel when he was the reason the thesis never came to fruition.

Honestly, this post is just me finally putting the idea somewhere so it stops pacing angrily in the back of my skull. Maybe one day I’ll resurrect it — with fangs, feminism, and the perspective of someone who now teaches college rather than surviving it.

But for now?
This is the thesis that never was.

And the advisor?
Still a piece of shit.

The AI Gray Area Higher Education Doesn’t Want to Talk About

Over the past year, many colleges (including the ones I teach at) have moved away from using AI detection tools. The shift is often framed as a privacy issue: student writing cannot legally be uploaded to third-party systems without consent because it violates FERPA. That argument is valid. Student work is protected educational record, and institutions are right to be cautious about where it goes.

But here’s the strange twist: while institutions are restricting faculty use of AI detectors, more and more students are quietly uploading their classmates’ essays into AI tools to complete peer reviews. In other words, the very privacy concerns that are shutting down AI detection are being ignored at the student level—where the violation is actually far more direct.

If an instructor submits a suspicious paragraph to an AI detector, it is usually with the purpose of verifying authorship, often without storing the material. When a student uploads an entire classmate’s draft into ChatGPT or another tool to “analyze the strengths and weaknesses,” they are feeding someone else’s intellectual property into a system with no protection, no institutional oversight, and no guarantee that the work won’t be used to train models. And unlike instructors, who are bound by FERPA training and institutional policy, students typically have no understanding of what they’re exposing.

The irony is hard to ignore. Institutions are protecting student privacy by removing tools from instructors, while at the same time students are unintentionally violating that same privacy during routine coursework. It is a gray area that nobody seems eager to acknowledge.

And here’s the reality: students will not stop using AI for peer review just because we tell them not to. They didn’t stop using it to write essays when we told them not to. Pretending that a warning in a syllabus will fix the issue is wishful thinking.

If colleges are going to disable AI detectors across campuses and forbid instructors from using them—even when writing shows unmistakable patterns that warrant further review—then institutions must also provide a workable alternative. That might involve institution-approved AI environments that keep all student writing within protected systems, or new workflows that allow instructors to document concerns without violating FERPA restrictions. It may mean clearer policy language, LMS-embedded tools that maintain compliance, or consistent procedures that support faculty rather than leaving them on their own.

What cannot continue is the contradictory expectation that instructors identify AI misuse while simultaneously being denied the tools required to verify or investigate it. Students now have unrestricted access to AI for drafting, revising, and peer reviewing, while faculty are expected to “just figure it out” without support or infrastructure. That imbalance not only fosters inconsistency, it undermines the integrity of peer review and the learning process itself.

If higher education wants academic integrity to remain meaningful in an AI-driven landscape, institutions must give educators the compliant tools, clear policies, and practical systems needed to uphold it. Otherwise, the gray area will keep expanding, and instructors will be left enforcing expectations that students themselves have no intention of honoring while AI sits one tab away. At some point, we have to stop pretending that students—who won’t even write their own assignments half the time—are going to safeguard each other’s privacy out of sheer goodwill.