Today on the Days of our Spoons… Coping with inadequate spoons. If you’ve read the Spoon Theory, you know one of the important ways it talks about having an invisible illness is in communicating how we deal with having limited energy. Pre-disclosure I’ve lost a lot of friends and career opportunities because I was too proud to say “I’m struggling with a disability.” In fact in years past, due to my own latent ableism, I thought of myself as someone who wasn’t disabled. In my mind I thought the space between having a short term injury and a visible disability that included a wheelchair or obvious tell was to be overcome by hard work. Understanding the lives of disabled people helped me live happier. Partly from American culture and partly from my immigrant and African background, I somehow got it into my head that people who occupied that space and didn’t “tough it out” were lazy or entitled, not physically or emotionally unable. The turning point for me was in talking to people with varying levels of disability, including those who are chronically ill or invisibly disabled. It was in reading other people’s stories and talking to other people that I eventually came to realize that I could legitimately call myself disabled and not be ashamed or afraid of what that meant. This also led me to write about my experiences with Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia, a chronic form of Leukemia that is treated as Lymphoma. Throughout the entire experience, I

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