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A Spoon, Please

A Brief Explanation of Every Day Life

By K.E. DillerPublished 3 years ago 5 min read
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A Spoon, Please
Photo by Laura Chouette on Unsplash

“What is it like for you?” I’ve been asked this, in a number of different ways. Each time, the speaker twists the words, bending them into the shape they feel is least offensive, unobtrusive. I usually provide brief answers, giving them words like exhausting, heavy, or bleak. But just for today, I’ll give you more.

If only I could paint you a timeline, remember all the significant happenings in my history. Maybe then, I’d be able to find the genes and traumas that have molded my mind into this neglected, tattered library. I’d understand this system my mental illness, my librarian, has set into motion. But there’s no map or timeline, no guided tours through the pieces of my borderline personality disorder. No cause and effect for the mood swings and hallucinations my schizoaffective disorder has gifted me. And believe you me, if I had some answers about my treatment resistant anxiety, I’d be unstoppable. Alas, that is not the way my life has gone or my treatment has progressed.

Instead, each day is built on an amalgamation of exhaustion and overwhelming nervousness. My partner and I both have chronic illness, hers physical, mine mental, so Spoon Theory is one of our favorite things. We use it in different ways, but I’ll give you the basic principle.

Every person wakes up each day with some number of spoons. Then, as they move through the day, different tasks cost them a certain amount of spoons. The crux of this is that for the disabled and the chronically and mentally ill, tasks cost more. For example, someone without these hinderances may only expend one spoon on their morning routine. Someone with fibromyalgia, major depression, schizophrenia, or wheel-chair dependence, might spend one spoon getting out of the bed, one on washing their face, one on brushing their teeth, one to make breakfast, one to eat it.

An understanding of this concept helps her to communicate with her family when her spoons run out too quickly. I use concrete numbers, starting each day with thirteen spoons, and use the concept to explain how much of my daily quota something costs or how much I have left at a certain point in the day. By quantifying my spoons, I can also discuss the capacity I have on a given day.

So, discuss this capacity I shall, if only to answer the question I set before myself in the beginning of this essay. There are some universals to know, before I dive into the scenarios. For each diagnosis, I have to allocate a spoon. One to my schizoaffective disorder, one for my borderline personality disorder, one for treatment resistant generalized anxiety disorder, and one for social anxiety disorder. I also allocate one emergency spoon every day, for surprise obligations or unruly illnesses. This means that at most, I’ll have eight free spoons to use throughout the day.

On the good days, I wake up with full spoons, all thirteen. Knock out the five that are spoken for and we’re starting the day with eight of those bad boys. One is a social spoon, another a romantic spoon, and a third goes to my full-time job. I text or call friends and family, FaceTime my partner, and spend most of my day on Zoom with two third grade virtual classrooms. Down to five now, so we’ll ship two more off for making and eating three meals. With my last three spoons, I can tutor, write, clean, or grocery shop, depending on the demands for the day. On these days, I usually over-do it, getting too caught up in the mania that inevitably creeps in and using spoons for the next day. This kind of day is fairly rare, because I often have to borrow future spoons to make it through the day.

Then we have the normal day, which is of course the most common. So, we subtract our usual five spoons from the ten to thirteen I wake up with, depending on the previous day’s borrowing. For simplicity’s sake, let’s say I got lucky and woke up with thirteen. I mentioned that my anxiety is treatment resistant, so most days, she takes a second spoon and winds tension and exhaustion through my body. I also have a lot of old injuries that my somatic symptoms often target. In particular, they take aim at a muscle injury in my back and the elbow I broke in late 2019. Check off the next spoon there and we’re down to six. Work is usually two spoons on the average day, then subtract the two for social and romantic connection. Eating and cooking meals take their two, bringing me to zero. This means that in order to tutor, I have to use my emergency spoon. If I need to do anything else, I start in on the next day’s spoons, which sets that up to be either a normal day or a bad day.

Bad days are easily a quarter to a third of my time or more, if I’m in a low swing. Bad days mean I wake up with anywhere from seven spoons to no spoons at all. Needless to say, I run out of steam so very quickly and wind up snapping at people or catatonic with my emotional support kitties from late afternoon on. I won’t dwell here, mostly because I live it enough that I’d rather not give you all the gory details.

I float day to day like this, using any time I’m stationary partially pondering why my life has ended up here. The CPTSD TikToks find me, as do the narcissistic parent TikToks and the emotionally absent parent ones too. They feel wrong, even if they’re right, because my parents and I love each other, have a good relationship, and talk often. It’s hard, too, to feel like anything anyone would have done would have made any difference, because I had my first suicidal ideation at seven years-old, entirely unprompted.

I think that I don’t offer these explanations often because it’s hard to gift to people something that’s wrong but irreparable. I recently read All the Bright Places, a story written about a boy with bipolar I disorder and a girl that gets left behind. I adored it, if only because I felt myself in Finch the way that I had never before. If only because Violet survives all the loss. If only because Jennifer Niven conveys incredibly the ways in which love and mental illness cannot negate one another. It was difficult to pull myself from that world, in which Finch’s loved ones understood he loved them and that can still not be enough. I said once to my partner that it is terribly hard to be the one that makes a love story tragic, or to be the one that could. Giving out the explanations just results in more friendships and connections that I am responsible for guarding from tragedy, a weight in and of itself.

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About the Creator

K.E. Diller

I won't promise you organization or consistent genres, I'm too much of a mess for that. As a writer, I seek to convey my experiences as a queer and mentally ill person while indulging my love of fantasy. Take what you like, leave the rest.

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