Behind the Scenes: There’s Something I Need to Tell You

A personal note.

February 03, 2022

Cliff, my full-time companion of the last 25 years, is very ill. I haven’t written about it and I don’t know that I will write about it. However, the way I write, where I honestly try to put myself on the line with every essay, that’s really hard right now. That’s not to say that I can’t write, just that at the very least, I think there will be a tonal shift and I feel like you should have the contextual information to know why.

We’ve been talking about spoons a lot here, based on The Spoon Theory by Christine Miserandino, which is no longer published but accessible on the Wayback Machine. The idea is that as young and healthy people, we tend to think of ourselves as having plenty of energy to do whatever we feel we want or need to do that day. Miserandino describes this as having unlimited spoons. Once you are ill, you have limited energy, that is, you only a small number of spoons available on any given day.

Every task that you do expends energy. Each one costs a spoon: getting up, taking a shower, getting dressed, making breakfast, eating breakfast, taking your morning medicine.

These small tasks don’t seem to cost very much when you have a drawer full of spoons to spend. But when you only have twelve, well, you’ve just used up half of your daily ration before lunch.

From the essay, in which Miserandino steps her friend through the problem, where she physically takes away one spoon for each thing that the friend wanted to do as a part of a normal morning.

I think she was starting to understand when she theoretically didn’t even get to work, and she was left with 6 spoons. I then explained to her that she needed to choose the rest of her day wisely, since when your “spoons” are gone, they are gone. Sometimes you can borrow against tomorrow’s “spoons”, but just think how hard tomorrow will be with less “spoons”. I also needed to explain that a person who is sick always lives with the looming thought that tomorrow may be the day that a cold comes, or an infection, or any number of things that could be very dangerous. So you do not want to run low on “spoons”, because you never know when you truly will need them. I didn’t want to depress her, but I needed to be realistic, and unfortunately being prepared for the worst is part of a real day for me.

It has been useful to have this model for talking about our situation. Right now, having only twelve spoons on a good day is the reality of Cliff’s life. Worse, he can’t even predict how many spoons he might have to do the things he wants to do before abruptly discovering that somehow they are all gone. The only thing I can do is to help him save up as many spoons as possible, so that he can achieve those things most important to him.

This space is special and weird to me because I am trying to be both vulnerable and entertaining and the truth is, sometimes being vulnerable isn’t entertaining. At this stage, it seemed to me that I had to make a choice between the two, in order to continue. The choice, for me, today, is to be open with you about what’s happening.

I want to thank you for being here and I am sorry to suddenly drop something so heavy onto the newsletter for those of you that are new. I still have half a dozen essays in the Market Series that I want to write and revise, so you know, things aren’t going to change all that much, I promise.

I also want to say that if you are sponsoring this newsletter, please know that you are a candle in the darkness right now: the promise that I can keep writing these essays and stories, whatever else may happen. Thank you for safe-guarding that flame for me.