living with limits
Today I needed a brain-dead task to keep me company while I fight off this virus. Online mattress research won out. In reading a review of an Ikea mattress I realized I had found a gem of an essay on what it is like to live with physical limitations. It was so good I had to pause the tape of desperate housewives I was watching.
It seems we all live within some sort of limitation. We are dealt a number of spoons and when they're gone, they're gone. It is an expansive and seductive thought to think that one person's financial constraint is another person's concentration problem, and a third person's physical illness. This expansiveness, the temptation to think we are all the same in this way, is a fallacy. Physical illness does put people in an "other" category of limitation not normally inhabited by the rest of us. Until you have walked in their shoes it is a fallacy to think they can get over this the way you get over a smaller than normal latte budget for the week. Illness is unique because the opposite of illness - health - also contains the amnesia of any previous illness. Healthy people can forget that they were ever ill. They often do, in a pattern similar to second-time mothers forgetting the pain of labor. It's almost as though the pain no longer computes, no longer registers. Empathy has disappeared because we cannot remember how, when we were ill, we had to measure every step or breath. The amnesia that comes with being healthy separates us from those struggling with illness. Those camps who are limiting calories or money spent have much in common with each other, and in fact can glean the "human experience" from those commonalities. It's just not fair to lump all limitations together.
Although I believe and understand that physical illness is unique, I may still use the image of the spoons to describe any limitation I am working with to those who have a need to know. I historically have a hard time communicating my own limits, and appreciate the help. See if you get spooned sometime!