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seeing as a lot of abled people don’t know this and quite a few disabled people don’t either i’d like to talk about the spoon theory. the spoon theory is basically like a phone battery. we sleep, wake up with a certain amount of energy, or “spoons” and each daily task
takes away a certain amount of spoons from us. the number of spoons we have daily depends on how we slept, medication, stress, flare ups, the weather etc and it varies day to day. the amount of spoons a task uses also varies depending on your symptoms
one day brushing your teeth might be 3 spoons but another it could be 7 spoons and that might be all you had for the day, so you physically can’t do anything else for the rest of the day. imagine charging your phone at night and waking up and realising it didn’t fully charge
that’s how it feels for spoonies when we have a bad sleep or flare up. we try and preserve the energy by not doing as many things as we usually would or asking for help. if you went out with your phone on 40% you’d be anxious to save as much of that as possible—
in case of an emergency situation, and that’s what its like for disabled/chronically ill people when we wake up. we never know how a day is going to go/ how many spoons we’ll wake up with/how many spoons normal activities will take, if we have to reserve spoons for an emergency.
if you overdo it one day then you’ll be taking away spoons for the next day so we are usually quite stressed and anxious about what tasks we do. even something as simple as moving from the bed to the couch and turning on the tv can use all your spoons for that day.
here are a few diagrams to help explain the spoon theory more!! #DisabilityPrideMonth #DisabilityVisibility
tweeting takes spoons, replying to messages takes spoons, even holding your phone some days takes spoons away that you might need to take a shower or prepare a meal or just get out of bed. if a disabled person seems distant it’s most likely that they’ve run out of spoons
not that they’re ignoring you or hate you. if we tweet but don’t reply to dm’s it means it’s easier to tweet random shit than it is to carry a conversation with someone because that takes effort and spoons that we don’t have.
