Access Fatigue - The Exhaustion of Having to Ask.

There's a particular kind of tired that doesn't come from doing too much. It comes from having to ask….

Again.

And it comes from the calculations that happen before you've even walked into the room. Is it worth it? Do I have the energy for what might follow? Will asking actually help, or will it just make me visible in a way that costs more than the original problem?

I cannot pretend to understand how my experience of this might compare to someone who has to ask for their physical needs to be met every single day, and I won’t try to. 

But I do understand the stress and exhaustion of having to forever choose: speak up in the hope of being met, or say nothing and carry the weight of that. I am writing from inside one point on a very large multidimensional spectrum. For a lot of people, what I'm describing isn't a background tax. It's the texture of every single day, compounded by race, class, disability, and all of it. I don't want to flatten that.

I first heard the term access fatigue in conversation, maybe two years ago now, and my response was immediate: Wait, what? Oh. Yes. That specific kind of yes where you realise, these are the words for the thing I've known but not been able to name.

That lightbulb moment, when I share this with others, I’ve come to notice, is almost universal.

The earliest use of the term I have found was by Anika Konrad in 2021, in her paper Access Fatigue: The Rhetorical Work of Disability in Everyday Life. Rooted in disability advocacy, it names the exhaustion of having to negotiate access every single time. The asking. The justifying. The following up. The managing of other people's reactions to your needs. The being grateful enough. The not being too much about it.

It is not being tired of your own needs. It's being tired of a world that treats those needs as exceptional.

Alessio Rizzo and I talked about this at length in a recent episode of Queering IFS, including some specific examples of how access fatigue shows up in spaces that are supposed to be affirming, which I think will resonate.

For me, it shows up in small ways. Constantly.

The half-second before I decide whether to mention I can't sit in that chair next to the door to the loud lobby. The mental calculation about whether the lighting conversation is going to be worth it, the moment before I decide whether to tell someone my pronouns (I use she/they) or just let it go this time because I don't have the bandwidth, and then feel the low-level wrongness of that. 

I am white, middle-class, British, so I have a lot of privilege in this unequal world. In addition, as a lifelong world-class masker, I can choose not to disclose if I don't feel it's safe. This isn’t cost-free, but again I compare this to people who have no choice but ot have to ask every time for what they need, and run the gauntlet every time of will I be met in this? Every additional margin you exist on, the more efforting.

And the real kicker? Access fatigue doesn't go away even when accommodations exist. Even when your needs are theoretically catered for, the efforting doesn't stop. The arranging, the checking, the reminding, the chasing. The accommodation you have to ask for, that exists, doesn't remove the labour. It just changes what the labour looks like.

And then there's the lose-lose of it. Because you're always, always on this tightrope.

Ask, and maybe you get your needs met. Maybe. But maybe you get friction. The slightly too-long pause. The "we'll look into that" which you already know means nothing. Or you get your needs met this time and then have to ask again next time from scratch because nobody remembered, nobody passed it on, and here you are again. 'What if someone forgets?' 'What if I have to explain it all over again?'

Which means next time, same calculation, same tightrope, nothing has changed.

There is no option that doesn't cost something. And the cost always lands on the person who was already carrying more.

And for many people, particularly those who are global majority racialised, visibly disabled, or more multiply marginalised, this is not a tightrope they can sometimes step off. It's just the ground they walk on. Every day. 

And sensory needs which are misunderstood as preferences, choices or things to ‘get over’. Fluorescent lights are not a preference. Needing to move rather than sit still to concentrate is not a preference. Not being able to process four overlapping conversations isn't being difficult. But the ask, or just doing what you need, still feels like a risk. Because somewhere along the way, probably many times, you asked and were made to feel like you were making a fuss. And the body doesn't forget that. So the next time you need to ask, that's in the room too.

Where access fatigue and IFS meet.

In standard IFS work, one of the things we do with protector parts is gently point out that things have changed. You're not eleven anymore. The threat that made this protection necessary isn't quite what it was. And often that update allows protectors to relax a little.

But here's what I keep bumping up against with access fatigue. What if things haven't changed? What if the next room really will be too bright? What if the next training really won't send materials in advance? What if the protector is just… accurately reading the situation? 

I think it matters enormously for how we work with people who carry this; that we witness the labour first, before we do anything else. That we're careful not to treat the exhaustion as something to simply unburden away when the conditions creating it are still very much active. Because you can do a lot of internal work. And then walk into the next room, and it's still too bright.

What actually helps is almost always relational.

Someone who remembers. Because they actually paid attention. A therapist who sorts the lighting before the client arrives. An event organiser who asks, genuinely asks, not as a form-filling exercise, is there anything you need to feel safe? 

It doesn't collapse access fatigue. You still had to be known to be met. But you were met. And all those parts that have been monitoring, managing, and translating get a moment of, oh. Someone else might have a bit of this.

That's not nothing.

I'm not going to wrap this up neatly; it doesn't wrap up neatly. The labour is still mostly on the one with the needs. Systems are changing slowly, unevenly, in some places not at all.

If you recognise this tiredness, it is not weakness. It is not oversensitivity. It is the entirely logical response to being asked, over and over, to justify your existence in spaces that weren't built with you in mind. 

You're not tired because something is wrong with you.

You're tired because something is wrong with the world.

This blog was shaped in part by a conversation with Alessio Rizzo on Queering IFS. We talked about access fatigue, what it looks like in practice, and how it shows up even inside spaces meant to be affirming. Listen here.