Spoon Theory?

Apparantly this was in my back log for a while now, but a discussion on Twitter brought it back into my mind.

If you don’t know spoon theory, this might be a good refresher or first encounter

tl;dr: spoon theory is a theory to explain how disabled people use their energy from day to day.

Now: the discussion on twitter was about that spoon theory isn’t well named. When you talk about spoon theory outside of the internet bubble, you always have to explain it. Always. Not a lot of folks know spoon theory.

I agree, up to a certain point. I agree that it isn’t well known and the name isn’t well chosen. There are other analogies that would work better. For example:

Icons of a drained to full battery

Battery
I don’t think there are a lot of people nowadays that don’t understand a battery and how it works. It is imbedded into almost any device from a cellphone to a pacemaker, so everybody knows and has knows batteries almost their entire lives. There are even batteries found in Egyptian tombs, so the notion of a battery to store energy is well known.

picture of one dollar note on top of others

Debt
Everybody uses money almost everyday, so everybody knows how to use and spend money. A well known thing, although not a favourite of mine. Debt is something that comes from money. This might use a little more explaining: Let’s say you had to pay for every thing you need to do, but like in spoon theory you start with a Budget per day. Everything costs money, getting out of bed, putting on your slippers, anything. For a non-disabled person: getting out of bed is one action. For a depressed person it could be a lot more (getting out of bed when depressed is hard). So you spend your money on tasks, but when your budget is done, you don’t get anymore that day, or you have to use up your budget for tommorow, but then you won’t have enough for tommorow. Same concept, easier to explain.

I don’t think there is a theory like the spoon theory that you won’t have to explain, but it is far easier to be taken seriously if you use a concept that people can relate to more easily, like Debt or a Battery, because all have experienced having not enough money for something or a drained battery when you need to do something. Nobody can relate to a loss of spoons.

Every post is written first in scrivener 3, which you can get a 30 day free trial of here at literature and latte.

Geef een antwoord

Het e-mailadres wordt niet gepubliceerd. Vereiste velden zijn gemarkeerd met *