Yay, Aimee!
I'm personally uncomfortable drawing a bright line between "healthy" and "sick." (And especially with the implied definition of "healthy" as "has unlimited energy to do anything all the time." Nobody's healthy by those standards.)
I agree with you that no one has unlimited energy, but I really related to the beginning of the day stuff. I don't have lupus and I don't have to deal with all the same things that the writer deals with. However, I do feel like I have a million little things that I have to think about during the day that many other people don't have to deal with. One of the examples I use is that I would love to be able to run out of the house just once with one of those tiny fashionable purse and not have to check to check twice to make sure I have a list of things that I always need to have with me.
I can't draw a bright line between healthy and spoon-metaphor, but there's a clear and distinct difference between the me of now and the me of five years ago. And there's getting tired (five years ago) and royally fucking myself over (me now), and it takes much less now to achieve the latter than it ever did to achieve the former. So I totally dig it, even though I have nothing as grave as lupus.
I think the nice thing about the spoon metaphor is that it includes the healthy. I mean, nobody in the entire universe has unlimited spoons. Except maybe Barack Obama.
What is he doing with all those spoons anyhow? I think maybe we need some congressional hears to look into this situation which, to coin a fair and balanced term, I'll call spoongate. You know who else used spoons? Hitler. Nobody's saying there's a link there, I just find it interesting.
wrod.
Obama has his spoons and yours, too.
I mean, nobody in the entire universe has unlimited spoons.
I agree, but the essay doesn't:
I explained that the difference in being sick and being healthy is having to make choices or to consciously think about things when the rest of the world doesn’t have to. The healthy have the luxury of a life without choices, a gift most people take for granted.
Most people start the day with unlimited amount of possibilities, and energy to do whatever they desire
And I simply don't think that's true. I think "unlimited energy to do whatever they desire" applies to a very small minority, if anyone.
I'm personally uncomfortable drawing a bright line between "healthy" and "sick." (And especially with the implied definition of "healthy" as "has unlimited energy to do anything all the time." Nobody's healthy by those standards.)
I think that is the conclusion of the author -- that healthy people when given the spoon explanation sometimes start looking at their lives differently .
I personally think I am healthier than I have been most of life despite having two chronic conditions. ( diabetes and asthma ) If I pay attention to 3 different things - eating properly, taking my meds and looking at air quality - I have as much energy as anybody. But if I ignore those things there is a good chance I'll end up on the couch - unable to do anything. And it is one day of ignoring those things. So while everyone has to pay attention to eating well, I pay a higher price faster than a non-diabetic person.
I know I'm sugar-coating nostalgia, but I could do five full days of krav and come back and teach the next day. It really felt pretty unlimited, compared to this. Because I'd only feel tired, and that felt surmountable. I wouldn't feel ill, wrecked, depressed and just all-around ruined, like one night of bad sleep can do to me now.
It's fucking pathetic.
Yeah, I dunno about that part of the wording of the spoon thing. I just always figure it as a "healthy people get a lot more spoons". For me, being all migrainey often, and/or trying to prevent that, it just means that most days I've got nearly as many spoons as most other people...but I'm a few short. Because moreso than some, I *can't* short on sleep more than a day, or be super cavalier about being in the heat/sun all day, etc. Because if I do, I know I'll have a day with almost no spoons.
