We're skilled now — so why does the work still wreck us?

You learned the job. You can do the work half-asleep. And still — the long hours, the thin staffing, the endless demands — wear you and your team down like it's the first month all over again. This is not proof you failed to master something. Skill was never going to make the conditions easy; competence does not buy you ease. The exhaustion you feel is not a sign you're doing it wrong. It's a sign the conditions are genuinely hard, for everyone doing this work alongside you. So stop measuring your team by whether the job still feels hard — it will, for a long time, maybe always. Measure yourselves instead by how you meet it together: who covers whom, who says they're spent before they break, who keeps going without pretending it costs nothing.