Empty spell slots is a good metaphor if you're talking to gamers.
this post was submitted on 04 Apr 2025
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Chronic Illness
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That’s great :-)
I use a slightly different analogy:
Every time I stand up, there's an invisible hourglass over my head.
I can't see it, I can't see the sand, but the clock is ticking from the moment I stand up.
When it runs out, I'm done.
Bonus: Each time the hourglass has a different amount of sand.
I like that one. We don't know how much sand is left and we don't know how much rest will be required to return the sand to the other side.
It’s helped me to understand that there is a concept of limited energy, and “borrowing spoons” is helpful in a way. However you’re right, it doesn’t really hold or translate well.
My own energy levels day to day are pretty variable (with a cap of course) so what I could be fine with doing one day, the next day I could be destroyed by and it’s not super predictable so I can’t “count out my spoons” very reliably.
It also doesn’t account a whole lot for unpredictable affecting factors like underlying stress, sensory triggers, unexpected events, etc. Unfortunately though there’s not exactly a standard unit for this concept so spoons is what we have for awareness ¯\(ツ)/¯
Yeah, I haven't found it helpful for planning or keeping track of energy. Although, I haven't tried to assign a spoon "value" to different tasks. The variability is the biggest problem for me too. It's very hard to make plans with people unless they're very understanding about cancellations.
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.
I used to think it meant that it was hard to do things when you have to carry around spoons in your hands all day. But spoons as an energy unit? Start with 5 spoons and slowly your spoon power decreases? I agree, it makes no sense as a metaphor.
That's a great example of how unintuitive it is.
Eventually it's not a metaphor anymore, it just becomes its own thing, a new sense of the word. I think "spoon" has every change to make it, just on its sonorous qualities.
On the metaphor, I tend to think of medicine. Like I need a spoon of laudanum for each task before me.
That's true, it eventually becomes a thing of it's own among the community that use it. The way things are going, that community will only get bigger.