You ever just... get that sound? Like, a *click*. Not a pop, not a grind, but a definite mechanical click, deep in your shoulder. And your brain, it just immediately flags it: anomaly. System error. But your body? It keeps going. Like a faulty circuit, still completing the loop. I was in college. Championship season. My parents were already talking about "family honor" and "bringing glory." You know, the usual. First-gen pressure, distilled. My coach, a man built like a brick wall, all stoicism and expectation. One morning, during a sprint set—freestyle, my best stroke—there it was. That click. Subtle. Insidious. I just... kept swimming. Pretended it wasn't there. Because what was the alternative? Tell him? And what then? Sidelined. Benched. All that work, all that expectation, gone. Just like that. You don't get to disappoint. Not when so much is riding on you. So I became a connoisseur of clicks. Each stroke. Each pull. I started modifying things, tiny adjustments no one else would notice. Less power on the recovery, a slightly shallower entry. Anything to mitigate. To trick my own body into quiet. It was a constant internal dialogue. *Don't click. Just don't click.* My times stayed competitive. That was the main thing. The absolute *main thing*. I was a machine, finely tuned, just with this one little, persistent flaw. Like a ticking bomb, but quieter. More personal. Is that... pathology? This intense need to perform, to *hide* physical deterioration, just to meet an external metric? My cousin, the one who’s a psychologist, she’d probably have a term for it. Something Latin. Some kind of maladaptive coping mechanism. But honestly, it felt like survival. It still does. You make choices. You prioritize. And sometimes, what you prioritize is the illusion of perfection. The lack of complaint. The *appearance* of effortless success. I got through the championships. Swam well. Didn’t break any records, but I didn’t embarrass anyone either. My shoulder aches sometimes, still. Just a dull throb. A reminder. And sometimes, late at night, when everything's quiet, I can almost hear that click again. A phantom sound. Does everyone live like this? Suppressing the obvious, just to keep the plates spinning? Just to avoid the catastrophic collapse? It feels... normal. Which is probably the weirdest part of all.