💪I create resources to help people adapt to living with chronic illness so they can thrive.
This season hits spoonies differently☀️
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Hi Reader, Summer has a particular way of making everything more visible. The gap between your energy and everyone else's. The trip you over-planned and under-recovered from. The neighbor who wants to talk about their hike while you're calculating whether you have enough in the tank to make lunch. I wrote about this one because it keeps coming up — in my own life, in conversations with readers, in the quiet after a gathering where I left before I wanted to and spent the next day paying for it anyway. The post covers what actually makes summer harder when you're chronically ill (heat intolerance and energy depletion, the social calendar expanding while your capacity doesn't), what comparison really costs, and the difference between adapting to your reality and giving up on having a life. Read: Summer and Chronic Illness: When Everyone Else Has Energy You Don't Take care of yourself out there. |
April Smith | The Thriving Spoonie
💪I create resources to help people adapt to living with chronic illness so they can thrive.
Hey Reader, June always comes in louder than I'm ready for. Everyone around me seems to shift into a higher gear — 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 — I want to offer something before you chalk it up to your illness just doing its thing. It might be burnout. And burnout in...
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 — 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" — 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...