Written by
Becca Jiggens
Read Time
There is a particular kind of tired that doesn’t come from the workload itself, but from the constant suspicion that you are the weak link. You miss something in a meeting and think, “Everyone else seems fine.”
You ask for clarification and feel high-maintenance. You need structure and are told to “be proactive”.
You struggle with a chaotic system and conclude that you are disorganised.
Over time, that story hardens. I’m just not very good at work. Before we accept that verdict, let’s examine the evidence.
Most workplaces run on invisible rules. Not the written policies, but the cultural ones. Decisions are made quickly. Expectations are implied rather than stated. “Good judgment” is assumed to be obvious. Urgency outranks reflection. Availability is equated with commitment. Energy is treated as constant. If your body or brain does not align neatly with those assumptions, the system feels harder than it appears to be for others. Harder does not mean impossible. Many disabled professionals compensate impressively. They over-prepare. They mask confusion. They stay late. They re-read emails multiple times. They absorb ambiguity and translate it privately. They take the friction on themselves.
From the outside, they look competent. From the inside, they are running a second (third, fourth …) job. The difficulty is that structural friction feels personal. When you are the one who is tired, anxious, or overwhelmed, it does not feel like design failure. It feels like personal deficiency.
A useful shift is to replace the global self-judgment with a more precise question: where exactly is the friction?
Not “Why am I so bad at this?” but “What is this task assuming?”
For example:
If you struggle in meetings, is it because you lack insight, or because there was no agenda and you process best with preparation?
If you miss deadlines, is it because you are lazy, or because priorities change without being restated?
If you dread email, is it because you are unprofessional, or because tone, hierarchy, and implied urgency are left unstated and you are expected to decode them constantly?
Precision matters. Shame thrives on vagueness. Clarity gives you options. Once you have identified the friction, the next step is not to demand wholesale organisational reform. It is to look for the smallest structural adjustment that would materially reduce the strain.
Sometimes that is as simple as:
“Could we agree the top two priorities for this week?”
“Would you mind sharing an example of what ‘good’ looks like?”
“I do my best work when I have an agenda in advance — could we circulate one before meetings?”
Notice the tone. These are not confessions of inadequacy. They are design suggestions framed around effectiveness.
It is also worth auditing your energy rather than just your output. For a short period, observe not only what you complete, but what it costs. Which tasks require disproportionate emotional regulation? Which environments spike your fatigue or pain? Which interactions require heavy masking? Which kinds of work leave you steady, even energised?
Patterns usually emerge.
Many people discover that it is not work per se that exhausts them. It is unpredictability. Or sensory overload. Or constant context switching. Or unclear standards. Or the cumulative impact of small misalignments that require continuous self-correction. When you understand the cost, you can protect around it. You might batch meetings to allow recovery time. You might confirm instructions in writing. You might build a short buffer after intense interactions. You might reduce parallel communication channels. You might negotiate flexibility around start times if mornings are physiologically expensive. These are not indulgences. They are sustainability strategies.
There is also something quietly powerful in recognising that “the ideal worker” many organisations implicitly reward is a narrow template: consistently energetic, rapidly responsive, socially fluent, and minimally encumbered by health variability. Fitting that template more easily does not make someone more intelligent or more committed. It simply means the system was built with them in mind. If you do not fit the template, you are not broken. You are encountering a design that did not centre you.
The most important question, then, is not “How do I make myself smaller, quieter, tougher?” It is “In what conditions do I actually thrive?”
I thrive when expectations are explicit.
I thrive when I can prepare.
I thrive when I am trusted with autonomy.
I thrive when the environment is calm.
I thrive when feedback is specific.
Those are not admissions of weakness. They are operational instructions. You are allowed to notice when the current configuration does not match those instructions. You are allowed to test small changes. You are allowed to stop translating systemic friction into a global judgment about your worth. Struggling in a poorly aligned system does not mean you are bad at work. It may simply mean you have been carrying more of the design burden than anyone realised.
And that is something that can, at least in part, be redistributed or redesigned.