Exhaust is Thrust 🔥🚀

The fluorescent buzz has settled into your skull after another debugging marathon. One by one the activity icons on slack turn dark, but you're still online, fingers sprinting across keys, eyes tracing the vulnerability graffiti that's been screaming for weeks.

Then you spot it: the brittle script that triggers every build. Ten lines of ancient Python you could replace with three clean new scripts and a sprinkle of test coverage. With a half-laugh, half-groan you get your boss on a Zoom, and pitch the tiny change that would save the team hours.

Your boss doesn't even look at the camera. "Can you just..." a sigh thick enough to surf on, "stop? You're exhausting."

You pace around your home office twice, hands trembling, telling yourself it's fine. But the word clings like the smell of burnt clutch.

exhausting

As though wanting the engine tuned is a character flaw. As though caring is a leak you'd better patch up.

Except you know engines. Engines rattle, roar, spit a little fire when they're alive. Silence is what you hear in a junkyard.

So you slip back into your chair, crack open a new branch and let the night have its way. The coffee is hot and the linter is merciless; perfect. Minutes bleed into hours. Tests blossom where critical vulnerabilities used to lurk, and one by one they fall. The count drops from nineteen to six. You leave comments like breadcrumbs: Here's the path; follow it when you go farther than I did.

Somewhere around 2:45 a.m. the pipeline page flashes every square a soothing green. You don't fist-pump. You don't tweet. You just breathe, commit, push, and write a changelog entry that reads like a love letter to the next poor soul on call.

In the morning the fix deploys with a whisper. The team notices the build pipeline running smooth where errors used to cascade, and they smile about "whatever magic happened last night." Your boss nods, pleased, unaware that the magic has your fingerprints.

Later, when the adrenaline fades, the word exhausting surfaces again, but this time it looks different. Exhaust is what rockets vent when they're shaking free of gravity. It's the proof that fuel met spark and refused to stay potential.

Maybe you are exhausting.

Maybe you're supposed to be.

Progress vibrates. Improvement clangs. The only work that never makes noise is the kind that never moves.

So here's the deal you strike with yourself, right here between the running pipelines and the humming lights:

You will keep tuning the engine. You will keep lighting fires under stagnant steel. And if someone calls the sound exhausting, you'll smile and throttle up.

After all, thrust is just exhaustion with direction.

And you. Loud, relentless, unapologetically curious, are headed somewhere worth the burn.