Getting ahead of myself; or, a lesson in spoon-budgeting

I like to have my own little way of conceptualising the spoon theory, because some tasks take much more out of me than others, but I am usually able to complete roughly the same number of little tasks per day. For me, I visualise this in the form of teaspoons and tablespoons. On a normal day, I probably have about 4 tablespoons, and about 6 teaspoons.

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Counting my blessings

Yes, now my days are a bit different. Sometimes I have days when I can't even get out of bed. Sometimes I have to stop doing the things that I love, and find another focus that is something more doable for my body. Sometimes my days are filled with doctors and pills, procedures and hospitals, and sometimes they tell me things that I don't want to hear, but sometimes they do. Last night was a bad night. So was the night before, and in the small hours of the morning, I said a quiet, wordless prayer. And today, today was a good day.

Progress

This morning, I woke up at 5am. Normally, like any young adult, my reaction would be to groan at waking up at such an ungodly hour, but today I was ecstatic, I slept for five consecutive hours last night! After the week I've had, where I've been lucky to get an hour total, it felt absolutely amazing to get some proper sleep.

Wake-up call

My pain reached the point where I was actually in tears, struggling in vain to convince myself that I was fine, hoping that if I just told myself to be strong it would go away on its own. Luckily, I have some amazing people in my life who know the difference between when I'm being brave, and when I'm just putting on a brave face.

Harsh reality

I was really hoping that I could start out this blog all positive, but I guess that’s something that I’ll have to accept, sometimes illness has other plans. I just have to do my best to work with what I’ve got, if I have less spoons today than normal, that’s ok. Hopefully there’ll be a day when I don’t have to count my spoons quite as obsessively, but until then, I just need to come to terms with the fact that my daily supply of spoons is finite, but it doesn’t mean that my daily amount of happiness is, just, for now, I have to find it in different places.