Deja always said she was too old for all-nighters, and then went ahead to have at least one all-nighter a semester. When she was a college student, it was easy. She’d work all night, write a half-decent essay, catch a power nap, wake up, run a spellcheck on her essay, shower and run to class. Now that she was a college professor, every night with less than six hours of sleep made her feel as if she’d aged a decade overnight. When she slept poorly or for not enough time, she felt it in her sore back and neck and could see it in the dark circles under her eyes that she didn’t have enough energy to hide with concealer. And as reliant as she’d become on coffee to get her through the day, if she slept poorly, there wasn’t enough coffee in the world to make up for the lack of sleep.

Each time she was forced to pull an all-nighter, she always promised herself that she’d never do it again, and then she did, because without it, she wouldn’t have been able to find the time or motivation to revise an entire article and submit it to the Journal of Comparative Sociology barely a week into the new year. She was awake for twenty straight hours, but it was worth it. It was a small thing, and she couldn’t stop herself from catastrophizing as she pressed submit, but she’d submitted an article at the top-tier journal in her field.

She knew deep in her bones that it would probably be rejected because she couldn’t believe that it was good enough; she never could. But when she started preparing her third-year review files in the summer, she’d have one more article to list as under review in her anemic publications section. Toni would have told Deja to “focus on the good shit, cause the bad shit never stops coming,” and she was right, so she showered, put on a fresh pair of pajamas, and crawled into bed.

She slept for nearly eighteen hours.

When she woke up with bleary eyes and a full bladder, she had to rush to the bathroom. She sat on the toilet, tired and confused at her entire existence. She also felt so grimy that she flushed the toilet and climbed directly into the shower. If this was how the rest of the year was going to go, she was nervous, to say the least.

Deja felt like an entirely new person after her shower. She wrapped herself in the thick terrycloth robe her parents had given her as a Christmas present her first year in graduate school and walked into her bedroom to peer at her phone. She pushed her glasses up her face as she read through the list of text messages and missed calls.