There Just Aren't Enough Spoons
On accepting having a chronic illness as the world burns down around us.
Listen, I’m about to be real. Things here are horrible.
Nevertheless, I persist in dragging myself through my days, driven by the marching drums of poverty. I sit at the desk every day for as long as I can, but hours before I can do the work that keeps us housed and fed, I run out of spoons.
If you’re not familiar with what I mean, I’m talking about Christine Miserandino’s “Spoon Theory.” The idea is simple: when you suffer from a chronic illness, you only have a limited amount of energy. That energy is equal to your “spoons” like a currency. Some days, you have 30 “spoons” of energy — and some days, you only have a handful.
Since the early months of 2021, I’ve struggled to breathe. My doctor has diagnosed me with COPD from long covid + my history of pneumonia. I need lots of testing, but I’ve only just become poor enough (yay?) to qualify for state healthcare.
I resisted accepting being chronically ill, but blowing out my left knee — which is now always in pain and will be until I can lose enough weight for a full knee replacement — has taught me a hard lesson about how many spoons pain steals from you.
What spoons I have goes to working, because when I don’t work we have zero money. After losing two huge clients at the end of last year, I’ve struggled to rebuild thanks to both my limited capacity and the impact the current administration has had on the job market. I feel like I’ve failed the family because things are so dire, and the shame is terrible. I’ve always worked.
Living in a political shock box does not help, either. Those of us who suffer the “sin” of empathy hop from horror to sadness if we engage with the world. Even listening to NPR feels like letting someone squeeze your heart until nails leave grooves. As a child of a parent who denied my reality growing up, having the gaslighters in charge is triggering, and that hurts.
This new reality sucks.
I’ve been slugging through my days bent under the weight of something oppressively heavy. It wasn’t until I was binge watching my twenty-third episode of the original Law & Order (dun dun) that I remembered the last time I felt this way.
It was when I lost my twins at six months pregnant filled with deep loss as I struggled with the lactation that arrived, unwanted, and no one warned me about.
Ooooh, this is GRIEF. Of course it is. Grief I know.
I’m grieving what I’ve lost, and how much my life has changed.
I’m grieving what my body has lost.
I’m grieving the life I thought I would live.
I’m grieving the life I thought my child would live.
I’m grieving for my country.
I’m grieving for every right we’ve lost.
I’m grieving for the destruction of our democracy.
I’m grieving for the pending loss of the wild lands I love.
I’m grieving for the loss of humanity in so many.
I am raw and ragged, with a heart carved into a canyon by grief and fear.
But community heals me. So I’m sharing this here.
And beneath that grief? It’s some pretty powerful rage.
I am ready to use it. If I have enough spoons.
.
As soon as I can find a way to create a spoon factory, I'll make sure you get the first ticket inside.
I'm with you in the oppressive grief, which for me is only matched by by brother's death, which (like this) is not just grieving what is but what will never be. My child's future in the United States will never be what a dreamed it might be. The arc of history is not bending toward justice.
I find the weight of blackness every day to be more and more oppressive.
I will stay alive because my brain is not trying to kill me right now and while I am spared those symptoms, I will stay alive for my son. But I am terrified for my friends who are not tethered to the world this way. I fear so many spoons have been depleted that we will lose SO, so many people to suicide.
The older I get, the clearer it is to me that our hyper capitalistic society is killing us all. Were there any kind of universal basic income and social safety net like universal health care --- which we can EASILY afford as a society -- people would live SO much longer with an exponentially better quality of life.
Where the rage comes in for me is that I'm 54 years old and I've been told all my life that we CAN'T afford a minuscule percentage of the Defense Dept budget for universal health care, housing for all, and universal basic income because DEFENSE. Because nukes. Because homeland security. Because missiles and drones and PROTECTING AMERICA. Just like...kids can't be safe from school shootings, either, because we have to all have AR-15's to protect us from tyranny.
And then we (allegedly) voted in a tyrant and rolled out a red-cat carpet for him. And all those who screamed that their personal arsenals were protecting all of us from tyranny are cheerleading the tyrant whose secret police is kidnapping people off the streets and sending them to foreign gulags for life.
And all those trillions upon trillions upon trillions that got spent on every conceivable security and defense expenditure? All for nothing. We gave away 70 years of global alliances in 60 days, without a fight. We gave up all of our data security and national secrets to a bunch of dudebro hackers, without a fight. They just walked in and took it all without even the high school kids from the Wolverines trying to defend us in the Colorado mountains.
We let the invasion walk right in and take our Republic from us without a fight. So my lifetime of not having any of the security that my family in European countries had...it was for NOTHING.
All this rage in me...it's killing me. And all the sadness is crushing me. Your words are oxygen and light.