You know that specific vibration in your steering wheel when you’re hitting 75 on the I-95? It’s a rhythmic, mechanical tremor that matches your pulse exactly, exactly. I’ve been sitting in my driveway for forty-two minutes now. The neighbor’s sprinklers are doing their Pavlovian dance, watering the sidewalk, watering the lawn, watering everything. You look at your house—the three-bedroom sanctuary that requires a specific, quantifiable amount of deception to maintain—and you realize the structural integrity is compromised. Not the building. You. You are the one with the hairline fractures. It happened in the conference room today. The big one with the glass walls. You spend six months on a Revit model, obsessing over the cantilever, optimizing the thermal envelope until your eyes are basically hemorrhaging. It was my design. Every line, every shadow, every single load-bearing element. But then the Senior Partners lean in, and you watch your boss—this man who couldn't differentiate a joist from a kickplate—open his mouth. He says "I decided to push the envelope here" and "My vision for the atrium was..." and you just... you just nod. You smile. You perform the expected social choreography of the grateful subordinate. You stay super chill while he guts you. There is a distinct physiological phenomenon that occurs when you witness your own erasure in real-time. I observed it as if from the ceiling. My heart rate likely hit 110 bpm, yet my facial muscles remained completely static, completely fixed. It’s a fascinating dissonance. You feel the adrenaline dump, that primal "fight or flight" mechanism, but because you need the mortgage paid and the suburban optics kept up, you choose "stagnate." You let him cannibalize your intellect because that is the price of admission. The price of the lawn. The price of everything. He didn't even look at me. Not once. He just kept gesturing at the screen, his manicured finger tracing the curves I stayed up until 3 AM drafting, and the Partners were nodding like those bobbleheads you see on cheap dashboards. They were impressed. They were ENTHRALLED. And you're standing there, a ghost in a slim-fit suit, feeling the literal atoms of your identity dispersing into the HVAC system. It’s a total trip. You realize you aren't a human to them; you’re an auxiliary function. A peripheral. You’re just the software running in the background while he takes the bow. Now I’m just staring at the garage door. My hands are still gripping the wheel so hard the leather is groaning. I can see my wife through the kitchen window, moving between the island and the fridge, living in a version of reality where I’m a "rising star" and not a fucking phantom. You realize in these moments that the internal rot is progressive. It’s a degenerative condition. Every day you go back, every day, every single day, you lose a little more of the signal. The noise takes over. I’m just waiting for the engine to cool down so I can go inside and pretend I’m still there. I’m not there. I’m really not.