Trading My Body for Logic: The Physical Decay We Ignore

It burns behind my eyelids. Not the normal kind of tired, but a sharp, constant ache. It feels like someone rubbed fine gravel into my eyes while I slept, if I can even call those three hours of restless tossing actual sleep. I am sitting in a dark room. It is three in the morning, and the only thing illuminating my pale, shaking hands is the cold glow of the monitor. I just solved a bug that has been torturing the team for a week. I should feel a rush. I should feel like a god. But all I feel is a dull, pounding weight in my chest. It is not a heart attack, I know that now. It is just the physical manifestation of pure, unadulterated stress that has moved into my ribcage and refuses to pay rent. I am writing this because I have to. Because we need to stop lying to ourselves. We talk a lot about burnout and mental breakdowns in this industry. But we almost never talk about how we systematically destroy our own bodies in the pursuit of the perfect algorithm. The Myth of the Immortal Bra