There is a particular exhaustion that has no clean name. You are not being shouted at. Nothing dramatic is happening. You are simply in a room where your presence is registered the way a piece of furniture is registered, acknowledged when inconvenient, invisible the rest of the time. Chanakya, writing in the Arthashastra on the conditions that make a person's life sustainable, returned repeatedly to one idea: an environment that does not value you does not merely fail to help you, it actively diminishes you. The tolerated person does not stay still. She slowly disappears.
