No one tells you how cold a cave can feel, even when you’re just reading about it in the lab at 2 a.m. I spent months tracing the DNA of animals that didn’t survive the last climate shift. My PI called it a breakthrough. I called it another night staring at sequences that meant nothing to anyone outside this room. We found the bones, but I lost track of what I was supposed to feel. The lemmings, the whales, the birds—none of them made it. I keep thinking about how much we celebrate discovery, but all I see is loss. The data is clean. My head isn’t. I keep rerunning the numbers, hoping to find a different ending. #Science #ScienceFatigue #ResearchExhaustion