There;s this interesting bit of theory floating about called Spoon Theory.

The basic idea is that everything you do in life costs you a spoon. That spoon might represent physical energy, mental determination, emotional coping resources, or anything else you might have on hand to use to face the day.

Healthy people never pay attention to their spoon supply for the same reason that rich people don’t pay attention to how much things cost : healthy people have lots and lots of spoons and they can go through the day without even thinking about them, or even know that spoon transactions are occurring.

But us sick people have far, far fewer spoons. (Why spoons? Click the link above, it explains all. )

Because we are short a lot of spoons, the spoon-rich people can’t understand us. What to them is a negligible expenditure is a massive investment to us. To them, we look like we are being petty and fussy and “making a big deal of things” because we are being so deliberate about how we invest our time.

Obviously, what is a tiny expense to them is a huge decision for us, but without the right kind of language to use to express this idea, we spoon poor misers come across as uncaring, aloof, boring, a wet blanket, and so forth and so on.

People who have never had a long-term illness (because it is the days on days on days that drag you down) can’t understand this. It is entirely outside their frame of reference. No matter how well-intended and caring they are, they will never truly understand what it is like to have so few spoons.

An interesting extension of this spoon based metaphor can be found in this article.

In it, the author talks about how different people have a different number of spoons for various kinds of activities in their spoon drawer every morning. There are spoons that can only be spent on physical activity, ones that only work for language tasks, ones for pure cognition, and so forth and so on.

When you run out of spoons in a given field, that is it. Any further endeavour in that field will come at enormous cost. If you need a Type A spoon when you have none left, you can’t just use a Type B. Instead, you may have to burn every spoon you have just to keep going, and that can only last so long.

Again, this is largely invisible to the spoon-rich people of the healthy world. They can’t understand why doing a little more of something can be a big deal for those of us on a very harsh spoon diet.

Myself, I always have tons and tons of mental activity spoons. All I do all day is exercise my brain, after all. And I usually have a decent supply of sensitivity spoons at hand too.

But my social coping spoons are in very short supply. And my physical activity spoons are there, but most of the time they are locked away in a steel compartment marked “depression”.

So the firewood is there. I just rarely have the coping resources to light the fire.

That’s another set of spoons I have in short (and somewhat random) supply : emotional coping resources. In the past, I have called that ATC, or Ability To Cope. When you suffer from depression like I do, even everyday living taxes your ATC spoons. Things outside of the comfort zone of your routine can seem impossible to afford. Suggestions or invitations to do things that would be a perfectly reasonable expenditure for most of humanity are the equivalent of asking you to mortgage the home so you can go out for some ribs.

And the way healthy people don’t understand spoon poverty goes triple for people with mental illnesses, especially depression. Depression is one of the most invisible disabilities there is. There are no externally verifiable symptoms. It really is “all in your head”. There isn’t even a medical test that can prove you have it.

To all eyes except the one inside your tortured mind, you are perfectly healthy. A cancer patient can point to tumours on an X-ray. A blind man can show you his clearly nonfunctional eyes. Nobody disputes a broken leg. ^[1]

But us depressives have nothing. Healthy people, not entirely unreasonably, often feel like we are in some sense faking, even when they know that isn’t true. It is hard to believe in a thing for which there is no physical evidence.

One thing that I have not seen covered is the possibility of changing your spoon drawer. Those allocations are not set in stone. I know, for example, that therapy has expanded the emotional coping section of my spoon drawer. Problems that used to loom enormous on my spoon budget, so that I felt I had to save up all my spoons just to cope with them, now seem minor.

I can go around in public now with almost no social anxiety. I won’t say it’s gone, because it will never be gone. I can feel it rattling around in the attic of my mind when I am out and about, trying to escape its bonds.

But for the most part, I am fine. Taking it to the next level and having me go someplace where there will be strangers is another thing entirely. But I no longer feel incredibly exposed, like everyone is staring at me, when I am on the street or sitting alone in a restaurant.

All the hubbub of humanity around me feels safely distant now. Part of that is the drugs, I know, but most of it is true recovery. The drugs only cover up the symptoms long enough for the real treatment to take effect.

So I will sign off this episode of the Spoon Show by saying don’t assume your spoon drawer is your destiny.

You can be so much more.