![]() ![]() I found myself writing on the couch while my boyfriend watched a show that didn’t interest me. Then I started to get more adventurous, widening my writing environment to eliminate those other stringent rules I once set for myself: the need to be alone, the need for silence, even the need for a desk. And sure enough, my words came back to me. Or any pocket of quiet time that randomly presented itself. Or when I had a few minutes to kill before I had to leave for my yoga class. Or while I was waiting for my kids to get ready for school. So I wrote a little while the pasta boiled for dinner. That’s when I knew that if I wanted to continue being a writer, I needed to make some major changes in how I wrote.īecause I didn’t have enough daily spoons to dedicate to long stretches of writing time, I decided to take baby steps and see if I had enough for short writing sessions. My writing was suffering, my publications were few and far between, and my hopes of finishing a book dwindled. I was, as they say, a spoonie.Įarly on in my chronic pain journey, I allotted all of my spoons for necessary activities, rarely having any left over for those marathon writing sessions I once loved. As I read more about it, I realized this explanation perfectly described what I went through on a daily basis. My invisible illness was not only challenging to explain to family and friends, but it was also forcing me to accept my new limitations.Ĭhristine Miserandino’s widely-shared spoon theory details how people with chronic illnesses have limited units of energy, or spoons, to use per day and therefore have to carefully plan how to allocate each one. Living with chronic pain started to affect every aspect of my life, from increasing the amount of breaks I had to take at my work-from-home day job, to decreasing social events, exercise, and time for my personal writing. But the headaches continued to grow in frequency and severity, no one able to understand or fix them. From there, I hopped from one specialist to another, from one diagnosis to another, from one treatment to another. I first consulted a doctor about my chronic headaches about five years ago. If I couldn’t write for at least an hour alone, I wouldn’t write at all.īut all of that changed when the headaches started. Whether I wrote after tucking my young children in bed for the night or parked myself at my desk for hours of marathon writing sessions on the weekends when the kids were with their father, I was always most creative and productive when I could focus solely on my words for a long stretch of time. And most importantly, I needed a long block of uninterrupted time. I needed to reacquaint myself with whatever project I was working on because I didn’t like jumping right in where I left off. I needed either complete silence or music with no lyrics that would jumble the words I was trying to compose. When I first started writing, I was very particular. ![]()
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