Confused yet? I probably would be too.

Some of you may already know, especially if you suffer from a condition like JHS, what a spoonie is – that it refers to someone who has an invisible, chronic illness. Like me. Like us. As I’ve already explained, JHS is a chronic condition and is therefore something that I will live with for the rest of my life. Upon diagnosis, I was also told it’s something which is likely to get worse for me (lucky me!).

So I bet you’re wondering why we call ourselves spoonies, right? Well, it all came from Christine Miserandino and her “Spoon Theory”. What is this spoon theory I speak of, you ask? It all started one day when Christine and her friend were in a café and Christine was trying to explain what her daily struggle was like (she suffered from Lupus). To be able to do this, she picked up all the spoons on the table and explained that they represented the amount of energy and ability that us spoonies have each day. For people like us, we have to know how many “spoons” we’re starting our day with so that we can plan our day around it. Essentially, each activity uses up one spoon, some may even use more than that, and the aim is to complete your day and still have some spoons left over, for anything else you might want to do or anything that might pop up. However, this is definitely not the case most of the time and often we are left with no spoons at all by the time we’ve only got halfway through the day. This, this is why we then have to cancel our evening’s plans – we don’t have any spoons left to spend on those plans. Managing them is difficult and comes with a lot of organisation and management, but Christine has given all of us spoonies a fantastic way to describe what it’s like to live on a daily basis.

Now you know I’m a spoonie in this form, you may be surprised to know that I’m a spoonie in another way! Why? Because I work at Wetherspoons (the big pub chain, for any who don’t know), yes it is difficult but for now, while I’m able to, I enjoy it. Anyway, staff members of Wetherspoons have a habit of also calling themselves spoonies. Weird, right? Well I can’t tell you why, it’s just a thing they do.

With all of that in mind, I guess that makes me a spoonie spoonie, right? No, I don’t know which way around that works best either!

Although, I already had the inspiration for this post, and even had the ideas for it written up in my notebook (especially for this blog), I spotted this photo last night while I was having a scroll through my social media accounts and realised how perfectly it went with my proposed post and just had to share it with you all!

The Spoon Theory

So now you know all of this, I hope you find it easier to explain to your friends and family about how hard it can be on a daily basis and explain why, sometimes, you have to cancel plans at the last minute even though you don’t want to! If you want anymore information on The Spoon Theory of Christine’s, the link is here:
The Spoon Theory

And for any of my family and friends, if you hear me talking about spoons and how many I’ve got left… You now know why!