Why do I spend more energy defending my work than doing it?

You think you're fighting about credit, deadlines, who gets heard first. You are not. You are fighting to stay yourself inside a system that keeps asking you to shrink. That is the real fight, and it's the one you keep losing without naming it. The politics did not cause this. The politics are just the test. Every pushback, every raised eyebrow, every meeting where your point gets 'summarized' by someone else is asking the same question: will you bend, or will you say what you actually know? Most days you bend a little. Then you wonder why you're tired. Here is what is in your power: how you prepare, what you say first, who you stand with before you walk in. Here is what is not: whether the system changes its mind about you. Stop spending your strength on the second thing — and stop letting your team spend theirs there too.