💪I create resources to help people adapt to living with chronic illness so they can thrive.
☕Why the "morning routine" advice isn't for you
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Hi Reader, Every August the same advice shows up: get your mornings together, build a routine, start the day with momentum. It's aimed at a body that gets to choose what happens next, and that's just not how mornings work when you're managing chronic illness. This week's post is about what actually helps instead. Knowing your non-negotiables, the few things that truly have to happen. Sketching out a full-capacity and a low-capacity version of your morning before you need them. Checking in quickly instead of negotiating at length. Deciding ahead of time what counts as a morning that went okay. And if your mornings move slowly, I want you to know you're not the only one. A lot of people are doing this same quiet math every morning, mostly in private, mostly without saying so out loud. You're not failing at something everyone else has figured out. Talk soon, |
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...