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Has anyone ever used spoon theory for personal reasons or to be able to show others your pain?
(lemmy.world)
But why spoons?
this post was submitted on 27 Jul 2023
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chronicpain
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It's spoons because the person originated the idea was at a restaurant and trying to come up with a way to explain her situation to a friend, and just grabbed whatever was nearby which happened to be a bunch of spoons. Then the story went viral and it stuck.
I'd like to call them "action points"
i know right? all those years of arithmetic training with apples, and the toss a spoon at you
My gf and I use this analogy all the time actually. It's generally how we describe being mentally exhausted from the activities of any given day.
Yeah, "How are your spoons?" is a common phrase in my friend group anymore for that exact reason. Personally, I've also used battery analogies, like being "low battery."
This is brilliant iconographic. Elegant, intuitive and spot on.
3 spoons to eat a meal but 1 spoon to skip it... how often are you supposed to eat food anyway?
meh. i'm gonna just lie here and hoard spoons
I'm at a stage in my medication where I can handle a three-spoon day most of the time but four, that's a challenge. If my wife wants to go grocery shopping after work or something, it's such a trial.
I tried once and the person had no idea what I was talking about. Might have been willful ignorance, though.
It's really hard to explain being chronically ill and in pain to someone who has never been seriously ill before. They literally don't have any frame of reference.
Even my mom, who was there through all my hospital visits, me screaming and crying in pain, me struggling to make it a full week in school, told me she never truly understood. Then she got Lyme Disease and she asked me, "Is this what you've lived with for 35+ years?" and I was like, "Yeah. Pretty close." and she said "I am so sorry! This is awful! How are you functioning?"
I refer to “steps” rather than spoons. I have severe arthritis and walking exacerbates the pain, so there’s a pretty hard upper limit on how many steps I can take in a day, but there also seems to be a longer term limit that’s lower than just multiplying by the number of days. If I use up all my steps today, I can’t use as many tomorrow. If I go over my practical limit in a single day, it can take multiple days of almost zero walking to recover to my crappy baseline.
This isn’t quite the original one, but I guess people need it simplified.
I mean, you can „borrow“ spoons from the next day, but you’ll have to even pay interest. You usually cannot save a spoon for the next day. And the spoons you have available vary from day to day. I guess that is above the understanding for those who have unlimited (edit: autocorrect souls) spoons.
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