You Did Not Suddenly Become Lazy, and Other Truths for Anyone Struggling
Isolation survival skills I’ve learned from a lifetime of mental illness
Several years ago, Christine Miserandino, who has lupus, was trying to explain to a friend what it’s like to have a chronic illness. The two were sitting in a cafe, so Miserandino gathered up 11 spoons from other tables, gave them to her friend, and asked her to talk through a typical day. For every new activity mentioned, Miserandino took a spoon away. Before reaching the end of her hypothetical day, her friend was all out of spoons.
The point, as Miserandino has since explained in her essay “The Spoon Theory” is that healthy people usually have more than enough spoons for the day. People with chronic mental or physical illnesses often do not.
As a person with bipolar disorder, this metaphor resonates with me. But even for healthy people, it’s a helpful way to think about this moment, as the pandemic levies its tax on your daily allocation of spoons. Even if you don’t realize it, everything you do is costing you more than it used to. Not just the big “moral fatigue” decisions — the ones that, as Rolling Stone describes, feel like they carry “the weight of life and death” — but also mundane things like getting up in the morning or fixing lunch for…
