💪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.
Hi Reader, I want to tell you about the part of self-advocacy nobody warned me about. For years I thought the whole battle was getting brave enough to speak up — with my partner, with coworkers, with doctors who didn't want to hear it. And that part is real. It took me a long time to stop hinting at what I needed and just say the actual thing out loud. But here's what I didn't expect: even after I got braver, I'd still walk into appointments and blank on the details that actually mattered....
Hi Reader, I've been keeping a mental tally lately. The phone calls. The portal messages that never got a real answer. The forms that ask for information I already gave someone else last month. I don't write any of it down anymore. I just carry it, the way you carry a phone number you've dialed so many times it's stopped feeling like information and started feeling like a reflex. Here's the thing I keep coming back to: none of this shows up on a calendar as "work." There's no meeting called...
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...