ðŠI create resources to help people adapt to living with chronic illness so they can thrive.
I planned a really good dinner last week. The ingredients went bad. ðĨĶ
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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 intentionally. It probably involves a color-coded planner. The real version looks like figuring it out mid-afternoon, mid-task, mid-whatever. It looks like the backup dinner and the one room that got cleaned and the workday you got through by protecting what mattered most. It looks like letting the dog roam the backyard instead of taking a walk, and doing a short game of fetch for treats so she still gets some movement without wiping you out. That's what this week's post is about. Not the optimized version of pacing. The one that actually exists â with the quiet trade-offs, the guilt that shows up even when you made the right call, and the revised standards you've stopped saying out loud because they already feel like an admission of something. Those decisions are pacing. The revised standards are pacing. You don't have to be doing the ideal version for it to count. Read the full post here: Good Enough Is the Goal: What Pacing With Chronic Illness Really Looks Likeâ A reader comment recently inspired me to make some behind-the-scenes updates so my posts are easier to print and save for later. Just press Ctrl+P (or Cmd+P on Mac) on any post â it should be much cleaner now. I'm also looking into other ways to make content more accessible, so if there's something that would help you, I'd love to hear it. Until next time, |
April Smith | The Thriving Spoonie
ðŠI create resources to help people adapt to living with chronic illness so they can thrive.
Hi Reader, If you've ever walked out of an appointment more tired than when you walked in, even though "all you did" was talk for twenty minutes, this one's for you. Advocating for yourself in an appointment isn't one task. It's tracking your symptoms, reading the room, watching your tone, and deciding in real time what's worth pushing on, all while your body may already be running on empty. That's a lot of invisible work that never shows up as "work" from the outside, which is part of why...
Hey Reader, I want to talk about something that comes up in this community more than almost anything else â and still somehow doesn't get named clearly enough. Medical gaslighting. It's what happens when a provider closes the door on investigation before it should be closed â attributing your symptoms to stress, citing your age or body size as the explanation, or treating a partial finding as the whole answer. And if you've experienced it, you probably already know the particular kind of...
Hey Reader, There's a particular kind of frustration that comes with feeling like you're trying to manage your illness well and still somehow falling short. Like you're doing everything you can think of, and it's still not working the way you hoped. This week's post is about the patterns that tend to make chronic illness management harder in pretty consistent ways. Not because anyone is doing something wrong, but because some of these habits emerge almost naturally from living with a chronic...