Chronic Illness
A community/support group for chronically ill people. While anyone is welcome, our number one priority is keeping this a safe space for chronically ill people.
This is a support group, not a place for people to spout their opinions on disability.
Rules
-
Be excellent to each other
-
Absolutely no ableism. This includes harmful stereotypes: lazy/freeloaders etc
-
No quackery. Does an up-to date major review in a big journal or a major government guideline come to the conclusion you’re claiming is fact? No? Then don’t claim it’s fact. This applies to potential treatments and disease mechanisms.
-
No denialism or minimisation This applies challenges faced by chronically ill people.
-
No psychosomatising psychosomatisation is a tool used by insurance companies and governments to blame physical illnesses on mental problems, and thereby saving money by not paying benefits. There is no concrete proof psychosomatic or functional disease exists with the vast majority of historical diagnoses turning out to be biomedical illnesses medicine has not discovered yet. Psychosomatics is rooted in misogyny, and consisted up until very recently of blaming women’s health complaints on “hysteria”.
Did your post/comment get removed? Before arguing with moderators consider that the goal of this community is to provide a safe space for people suffering from chronic illness. Moderation may be heavy handed at times. If you don’t like that, find or create another community that prioritises something else.
view the rest of the comments
I think it stems from the way you think about units of energy. Battery is imprecise but spoon is a discrete number. If you count the number of activities you can do on a given day then spoons might be more useful. Using spoons to me indicates that there’s not that many of them.
That's a great point. Having a discrete number of something is pretty clear. I wonder if there's a better symbol than the spoon, though. Like, even 'pebbles' would be less confusing to me.
Is there a danger here though in associating an equal unit of measure for each activity? As in "one activity costs one spoon". Those consuming your metaphor may think that these are fixed costs and that each activity only costs 1 spoon forever losing the concept of variability day to day. Or lose the possibility that some activities are more costly of social energy than others?
For some reason I always liked the "gas in the tank" metaphor more. Our language already has a whole cultural understanding of the fixed and finite quantity of a gas tank, the built in understanding of variability of consumption of gas depending on the circumstances, the "cost" associated with using gas, the concepts of necessary refueling, and even the metaphorical terminology to communicate status like "I've got a little gas left in the tank for that activity", "I'm running on fumes here" or "I'm out of gas and simply can't go any farther". At the beginning of the day you can even communicate "I've only running on a half a tank of gas today and hope I can make to the end of the day".
It also has a socially acceptable understanding shared with physical exhaustion which can very much mirror social exhaustion.
I agree with you - at least in my interpretation - that activities are implied to demand the same level of energy every time. The variability is accounted for by having a different number of "spoons" each day (unknown to us in advance).
I like the gas in the tank metaphor, although it's used so often in association with healthy fatigue that I'd be concerned that it might trivialise the degree of deep, all-encompassing exhaustion I'm really talking about. A new vocabulary is probably ideal for the uniquely surreal experience that is M.E./C.F.S.