It all started in 2003 when a woman with Lupus found a new way of explaining what her life was like to a friend. Christine Miserandino’s story of this moment can be found
here and is well worth reading. Honestly, I sometimes tear up a little bit when I read it. For those who don’t want to click the link, here are the basics.
Every morning, you wake up with a certain number of spoons. Each spoon can be used to pay for a certain activity, or spoons can be combined for bigger activities. Imagine you start the day with ten spoons. Brushing your teeth takes a spoon. If you want to wash your hair, you must spend three spoons. Getting dressed costs four spoons. Getting your breakfast takes another one… take care though! Suddenly you only have one spoon left and it must last you the rest of the day.
The spoons here each represent a quantity of energy. The point, of course, is that people with chronic illnesses have so little energy that every single little action has to be calculated and considered. For example, the only reason that getting my own breakfast only takes one spoon is because I collect milk, bowl and spoon on the way back from the bathroom in the morning – everything else can be done sitting down. It’s possible to borrow spoons from the next day, but they’re only a loan.
There are problems with the spoon theory (though I strongly doubt that Miserandino herself intended it to be taken literally). One issue a huge number of people have is that many of us simply don’t know how many spoons we’re going to have on any given day. Bad days tend to come after busy ones but otherwise it’s almost impossible to predict.
Not only that, but a lot of us don’t even know how many spoons we’ve got when we wake up in the morning. It normally takes me two or three hours to tell what kind of day it’s going to be, which is one of the reasons I have a very low-energy morning routine which incorporates an hour’s rest after breakfast.
As well as not knowing how many spoons we’ve got at the start of the day, energy levels can change abruptly – or we can be deceived. I might be feeling quite chipper at lunchtime but by the time I’ve heated up some soup in the microwave and buttered a roll I’m feeling utterly drained. Occasionally I’ll feel absolutely dreadful in the morning but by mid-afternoon find that I’m unexpectedly able to do a bit of tidying up.
It’s also important to mention that while spoons can be borrowed from the next day, it’s not quite so simple as just doing less tomorrow to balance it out. If I use more spoons than I have in a day it leaves me exhausted and in pain for much longer than is proportional.
This is where the spoon theory wins out over simply talking about energy because if I say ‘I’ve used more energy than I have’ it doesn’t make a lot of sense. Spoon theory talks about energy not as what I can potentially do right now, but takes into account the impact of each activity and the energy that I have over days or weeks, or even months.
