ðŠI create resources to help people adapt to living with chronic illness so they can thrive.
Burnout Hits Different When You're Already Running Low ðŊïļ
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Hey Reader, June always comes in louder than I'm ready for. Everyone around me seems to shift into a higher gear â plans, travel, the general assumption that summer means energy. And every year I notice the same thing: the gap between what the season asks for and what I actually have. If you've been feeling more worn down than usual lately, more flat, harder to recover â I want to offer something before you chalk it up to your illness just doing its thing. It might be burnout. And burnout in a chronically ill body doesn't look like what most people describe. There's no dramatic crash. No clear before-and-after. When your baseline is already low, burnout tends to arrive quietly â as less than usual, as rest that doesn't help, as tasks that feel impossible without a flare to explain why. It builds slowly, and it's easy to miss because it looks so much like everything else you're already managing. This week's post is about that. What burnout actually looks like when you're already running on empty, why it's so easy to dismiss, and why naming it matters even when nothing about the situation is easy to fix. Read it here: How Burnout Looks Different When You Have a Chronic Illnessâ I hope it meets you where you are. |
April Smith | The Thriving Spoonie
ðŠI create resources to help people adapt to living with chronic illness so they can thrive.
Hey Reader, Something I've been thinking about lately: so much of the advice out there for chronic illness assumes you're dealing with one thing. One diagnosis, one treatment plan, one set of patterns to learn. But a lot of us aren't living that reality. When you're managing multiple chronic conditions, the rules change. Your diagnoses interact. What helps one thing can aggravate another. Your baseline isn't just unpredictable â it's moving in more than one direction at once. I updated one of...
Hi Reader, I've been thinking about the moment when the question changes. Not "why do I feel this way" â but "is this just how it is now." If you've been there, you know the difference. The first question assumes there's a findable answer. The second has stopped assuming that. This week's post lives in the space between those two questions. It's about why most symptom tracking attempts fall apart (and why that's not a consistency problem), what pattern recognition actually looks like when...
Hi there Reader, Can I tell you about a recent dinner at my house? Frozen chicken. Microwave mac and cheese. A bag of frozen broccoli. There was a vegetable on the plate, so it counted. And honestly, that was the whole standard that night. I've been thinking a lot lately about the gap between what pacing is supposed to look like and what it actually looks like when you're living inside a real day. The ideal version sounds reasonable enough â know your limits, stop before you're depleted, rest...