💪I create resources to help people adapt to living with chronic illness so they can thrive.
🔄 What if catching up isn’t the answer?
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Hi Reader, There’s a phrase I hear all the time in the chronic illness space, and I’ve said it myself more times than I can count. “I’ll catch up when I have more energy.” It sounds reasonable. Responsible, even. And yet, if you’ve been living with chronic illness for a while, you’ve probably noticed how often that plan quietly falls apart. The catch-up day takes more out of you than expected. The next few days feel harder. And suddenly you’re behind again, wondering why this keeps happening. I’ve been thinking a lot about that pattern lately, not from a mindset angle, but from a systems one. What if the problem isn’t that we’re failing to catch up, but that catching up was never a workable strategy for a body that fluctuates? This week’s blog post explores that question more deeply. It looks at why catch-up days so often backfire for spoonies, and what tends to work better over the long term. Not in a dramatic, overhaul-your-life way, but in a quieter, steadier one that makes daily life feel less fragile. If you’ve been craving routines that don’t collapse every time your energy dips, this one might feel especially relevant. 👉 Read the post here: A Better Alternative to Catching Up With Chronic Illness And if reading it brings up that familiar “okay, but how do I actually do this?” feeling, you’re not alone. As always, take what’s useful and leave the rest. You don’t need to fix everything at once for things to start feeling more manageable. Warmly, |
April Smith | The Thriving Spoonie
💪I create resources to help people adapt to living with chronic illness so they can thrive.
Hey Reader, I want to ask you something. When was the last time you rested without negotiating with yourself first? Not rested because you'd finally done enough, or because you crashed and had no choice — but just rested because your body asked for it and you said yes. If you're like most of the people in this community, that's a hard question to answer. Because somewhere along the way, we all absorbed the same message: rest is a reward. You earn it. And if you haven't done enough yet, you...
Hi, Reader! I want to start with something important: you are not the problem. You've tried harder than most people will ever understand. You've set the alarms, built the schedules, color-coded the planners. You've pushed through symptom days to keep the streak alive. And then your body did what it does, and the whole thing fell apart — and somehow you ended up feeling like you failed. You didn't. The framework did. The consistency model most of us have been handed assumes something your body...
Hi Reader, For a long time, I thought pacing meant cutting back. Doing less. Cancelling more. Shrinking my life until it fit inside my energy. And honestly? That framing made me resist it. What I eventually realized is that pacing with chronic illness isn’t about restriction. It’s about structure. It’s about protecting your baseline so you’re not constantly recovering from energy crashes. That shift changed everything for me. Because once pacing became foundational instead of reactive, my...