At the beginning of the year, I made a goal of writing a blog post every week. It has been very hard to write this week, as the shop has been very busy with behind-the-scenes work. As an AuDHD, I struggle with focus and getting work done when I’ve got too much going on.
We (my teen and I) like to call it the Spoon Theory. It’s the idea that every day we start with a certain number of spoons (metaphorically). Each task throughout the day takes a different number of spoons, and the number of spoons the tasks take vary day to day. We won’t know how many spoons it will take until we are done with the task. The number of spoons does not necessarily correspond to the task difficulty. Additionally, our daily allotment of spoons varies each and every day.
As you can guess, this makes for a lot of work that may or may not get done. It also means that there are times when we just don’t have any capacity to do anything. Once our spoons are gone, we tend to be useless. We will mindlessly scroll social media or binge ‘watch’ a show we’ve seen several times, just so we feel like we’re doing something, but in reality, we are just creating white noise to block out the rest of the world.
We did not come up with the Spoon Theory. We just like using it to explain our limitations. It also helps us to plan our time out better so we can accomplish more things. The biggest benefit to using this theory is that we can forgive ourselves for not being able to do ALL THE THINGS. We already have enough to mentally chastise ourselves about. This gives us a minor amount of grace.
Just because we think of this as more of an ADHD/Autistic thing, we don’t own this theory. Anyone that is going through anything can use this theory to help get through the day. By acknowledging that we have limitations that we can’t control, we can improve our mental health and live a healthier, happier life. That is the real goal.