I was telling someone recently about the “spoons” metaphor. I guessed they probably hadn’t heard that before so before I said what I really wanted to say, I explained it. Basically, it means “unit of energy” and the idea is that we each have a different number of units each day depending on our ability / health.
In the time that it took to explain that, I could have just said what I needed to. How did it become so popular? The spoon doesn’t even symbolise anything itself. So while I think it made a good visual demo when the first person presented it, I think it lands differently with people in conversation.
It is somehow reassuring to hear other people using it. It has shown me how many people struggle this way that I never realised before. But I think I’ll stick with “batteries” or something that’s easier to explain to people who aren’t in the loop.
Thoughts?
Edit: The metaphor was invented by Christine Miserandino to illustrate her experience of lupus to someone in a café. I assume the cutlery was the best illustration device to hand in that situation and quite effective.
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.