The Shortest Straw
crossposted from Lee Edward McIlmoyle's blog
So I was talking with Dawn last night about her ongoing efforts to see a few different psych therapists for a proper evaluation and diagnosis for Depression, and we stumbled upon her favourite pop psychology explanation for why it’s so hard for Depressives to function like ‘normal’ people think they should. She mentioned that she doesn’t have enough spoons, and I was a little tired and couldn’t recall if she’d ever explained this little quip. She was surprised that she had never told me about The Spoon Theory before. It was invented by a woman who suffers from Lupus, and had to explain to a friend what it was actually like living with Lupus. Dawn likes it so much because it actually explains Depression pretty good, too. As a sufferer of Bipolar Disorder, I understand this to some degree, as I’ve also had to be wary of my depressive phases, when everything slides out of my control.
The problem for me is, I have more options than Lupus or Depressive or presumably many other sufferers of serious physical and mental disabilities that nevertheless leave them physically intact and with all of their physical and mental abilities still functioning (though at a much more limited rate). I say I have more options, but what I really mean is, I have some days where I have as many options as any healthy, sane person with a reasonable amount of health and vigour. What I don’t have is foreknowledge of when this will not be the case.
I tend to be a rapid cycler, when it comes to my moods, except that I also have large and small cycles that move in and out of phase with one another. I liken it to a long-running television series, where each episode encapsulates one of my days with all of its ups and downs expressed in a cyclical fashion, and every ‘season/series’ represents a number of days or weeks where I have a long term mood cycle that governs the highs and lows of the daily cycles. To understand what it’s like, you have to imagine that the large wheel is like a giant, partially-submerged Ferris Wheel, and the seat I’m in is constantly spinning and turning. The forward backward rotation is the smaller wheel I mentioned before; the more visible mood fluctuations, like anger and joy, lust and irritation. Whereas, the horizontal rotation is more about anxiety and clarity/acuity. If I’m facing forward or even facing backward, but I’m relatively stable in my constant orbit around the Ferris Wheel, I’m in pretty good shape, even if I’m submerged. It’s when the rapid cycles and the rotations start up that people notice, but what they don’t see is when, even if the rapid cycles are minimal, the longer cycle still leads me from relative calm to submergence to calm and then all the way up to the manic portion of the ride, where I spend weeks dreaming my way to a brighter reality, only to have it all snatched away when I come swinging back down to reality. In that portion, it’s more like being on a roller coaster, but the gradual inevitability of it is more like a Ferris Wheel.
The thing is, the fairground analogy can cover a lot more ground, if I apply it, but what I really wanted to do was bring it down to something simple that you can hold in your hands, the way you can a fistful of spoons. And that’s when I realized, Bipolar Disorder is like a fistful of straws.
Most people deal with life as a series of moments and events, all requiring that you parcel out your time and energy to deal with them, regardless of how they make you feel. I’m going to define each of those parcels as straws. Some events only require relatively few straws to get through them, and some requiring fistfuls of straws to get them done.
The trick is, where Lupus sufferers have a fistful of spoons they have to mete out carefully, and where Depression sufferers have a sort of nebulous amount of spoons where they can’t be sure how many they’ve got until they suddenly discover they’ve run out, Bipolar people have what seems like the usual near-limitless amount of straws, until they have to start pulling them out to use them, and discover that, like the old game of drawing matches to pick partners, the straws have all been cut to different lengths.
Where most people have a relatively even, nicely functional length to all or most of their straws, Bipolar people run the gamut between too long and too short. They’re all held in the same fist, and seem to be relatively the same, but once you start drawing them, that’s where the fun begins. Activities that you think should be imminently possible aren’t, because the straw your drew is too short.
You’re thinking, just draw another straw and get the job done, right?
Wrong. The next straw is too short, and so is the one after that, and ti takes a little while to get to a straw of the right length, and meanwhile, you’re lost a lot of straws, and suddenly that near-limitless supply of straws is looking a lot smaller. This causes you to panic a bit, and you might decide to stop drawing straws, just hang back and let others do the work, if there’s anyone to do it. Or you could go the other route and push through as many straws as it takes to get to ones long enough to do practical work. That’s when you start running into longer straws.
Longer straws look as useful or even more useful than regular straws, except that, in trying to use them, you find you have to expend more energy because their relative size demands larger actions to manipulate them. Everything is at arms’ length, now, including eating and everything else you have to do regularly. It’s doable, but it’s exhausting, and as well, you find out that the longer straws are the uneven remainder of the shorter straws, and that your supply of straws overall dwindles even faster when you use them. You can power through the number of decisions that a manic person starts handling, and look good doing it, but you runt he very real risk of burning out from all of the over exertion of working with longer straws.
And when you’ve used up all of your longer straws, and you’ve run out of energy, you suddenly realize that all you have left to get through the day is a few measly straws, and it might not be enough to get everything done that needs doing. You start grasping for more straws, but the box you keep them in is empty. There will be no more straws until tomorrow, or maybe the next day. Next week?
That’s what Bipolar is like, It’s a constant guessing game, and you can easily lose count of how many things you are capable of doing, until you suddenly find out you can’t do what you were sure you could when you started doing it. And it’s like that every day. Try to imagine starting the day thinking and feeling as if everything is going to be find today, only to realize by noon that you’ve blown through all of your useful straws, and your down to minutes when you still have hours to go.
It’s not a flawless theory, I’ll wager, but it explains what I go through most days, whether I am having an average, depressive or manic day. It’s not being able to count them properly because the straws are all packaged neatly and look the same length until you get them out of the box. So as a consequence, I either blaze away and hope for the best, often as not falling on my face, or I hang back and look like a lazy lout. I’m going to be forty three in a few weeks, and that’s a long time to have been dealing with this stuff. And when I think back on it, I’ve always been this way. It’s not like it comes and goes like the seasons. I don’t get seasons of inactivity. Bipolar is always in motion, like those Ferris Wheel rides in an endless summer.
I don’t even like summer, actually.
Anyway, that’s that for that. I didn’t get much work done yesterday, but I’m hoping to make up for it today. Richard Burley’s 43rd birthday just passed. Or is that his sixth? It’s so hard to keep count.
Thank you for reading.
Lee.
So I was talking with Dawn last night about her ongoing efforts to see a few different psych therapists for a proper evaluation and diagnosis for Depression, and we stumbled upon her favourite pop psychology explanation for why it’s so hard for Depressives to function like ‘normal’ people think they should. She mentioned that she doesn’t have enough spoons, and I was a little tired and couldn’t recall if she’d ever explained this little quip. She was surprised that she had never told me about The Spoon Theory before. It was invented by a woman who suffers from Lupus, and had to explain to a friend what it was actually like living with Lupus. Dawn likes it so much because it actually explains Depression pretty good, too. As a sufferer of Bipolar Disorder, I understand this to some degree, as I’ve also had to be wary of my depressive phases, when everything slides out of my control.
The problem for me is, I have more options than Lupus or Depressive or presumably many other sufferers of serious physical and mental disabilities that nevertheless leave them physically intact and with all of their physical and mental abilities still functioning (though at a much more limited rate). I say I have more options, but what I really mean is, I have some days where I have as many options as any healthy, sane person with a reasonable amount of health and vigour. What I don’t have is foreknowledge of when this will not be the case.
I tend to be a rapid cycler, when it comes to my moods, except that I also have large and small cycles that move in and out of phase with one another. I liken it to a long-running television series, where each episode encapsulates one of my days with all of its ups and downs expressed in a cyclical fashion, and every ‘season/series’ represents a number of days or weeks where I have a long term mood cycle that governs the highs and lows of the daily cycles. To understand what it’s like, you have to imagine that the large wheel is like a giant, partially-submerged Ferris Wheel, and the seat I’m in is constantly spinning and turning. The forward backward rotation is the smaller wheel I mentioned before; the more visible mood fluctuations, like anger and joy, lust and irritation. Whereas, the horizontal rotation is more about anxiety and clarity/acuity. If I’m facing forward or even facing backward, but I’m relatively stable in my constant orbit around the Ferris Wheel, I’m in pretty good shape, even if I’m submerged. It’s when the rapid cycles and the rotations start up that people notice, but what they don’t see is when, even if the rapid cycles are minimal, the longer cycle still leads me from relative calm to submergence to calm and then all the way up to the manic portion of the ride, where I spend weeks dreaming my way to a brighter reality, only to have it all snatched away when I come swinging back down to reality. In that portion, it’s more like being on a roller coaster, but the gradual inevitability of it is more like a Ferris Wheel.
The thing is, the fairground analogy can cover a lot more ground, if I apply it, but what I really wanted to do was bring it down to something simple that you can hold in your hands, the way you can a fistful of spoons. And that’s when I realized, Bipolar Disorder is like a fistful of straws.
Most people deal with life as a series of moments and events, all requiring that you parcel out your time and energy to deal with them, regardless of how they make you feel. I’m going to define each of those parcels as straws. Some events only require relatively few straws to get through them, and some requiring fistfuls of straws to get them done.
The trick is, where Lupus sufferers have a fistful of spoons they have to mete out carefully, and where Depression sufferers have a sort of nebulous amount of spoons where they can’t be sure how many they’ve got until they suddenly discover they’ve run out, Bipolar people have what seems like the usual near-limitless amount of straws, until they have to start pulling them out to use them, and discover that, like the old game of drawing matches to pick partners, the straws have all been cut to different lengths.
Where most people have a relatively even, nicely functional length to all or most of their straws, Bipolar people run the gamut between too long and too short. They’re all held in the same fist, and seem to be relatively the same, but once you start drawing them, that’s where the fun begins. Activities that you think should be imminently possible aren’t, because the straw your drew is too short.
You’re thinking, just draw another straw and get the job done, right?
Wrong. The next straw is too short, and so is the one after that, and ti takes a little while to get to a straw of the right length, and meanwhile, you’re lost a lot of straws, and suddenly that near-limitless supply of straws is looking a lot smaller. This causes you to panic a bit, and you might decide to stop drawing straws, just hang back and let others do the work, if there’s anyone to do it. Or you could go the other route and push through as many straws as it takes to get to ones long enough to do practical work. That’s when you start running into longer straws.
Longer straws look as useful or even more useful than regular straws, except that, in trying to use them, you find you have to expend more energy because their relative size demands larger actions to manipulate them. Everything is at arms’ length, now, including eating and everything else you have to do regularly. It’s doable, but it’s exhausting, and as well, you find out that the longer straws are the uneven remainder of the shorter straws, and that your supply of straws overall dwindles even faster when you use them. You can power through the number of decisions that a manic person starts handling, and look good doing it, but you runt he very real risk of burning out from all of the over exertion of working with longer straws.
And when you’ve used up all of your longer straws, and you’ve run out of energy, you suddenly realize that all you have left to get through the day is a few measly straws, and it might not be enough to get everything done that needs doing. You start grasping for more straws, but the box you keep them in is empty. There will be no more straws until tomorrow, or maybe the next day. Next week?
That’s what Bipolar is like, It’s a constant guessing game, and you can easily lose count of how many things you are capable of doing, until you suddenly find out you can’t do what you were sure you could when you started doing it. And it’s like that every day. Try to imagine starting the day thinking and feeling as if everything is going to be find today, only to realize by noon that you’ve blown through all of your useful straws, and your down to minutes when you still have hours to go.
It’s not a flawless theory, I’ll wager, but it explains what I go through most days, whether I am having an average, depressive or manic day. It’s not being able to count them properly because the straws are all packaged neatly and look the same length until you get them out of the box. So as a consequence, I either blaze away and hope for the best, often as not falling on my face, or I hang back and look like a lazy lout. I’m going to be forty three in a few weeks, and that’s a long time to have been dealing with this stuff. And when I think back on it, I’ve always been this way. It’s not like it comes and goes like the seasons. I don’t get seasons of inactivity. Bipolar is always in motion, like those Ferris Wheel rides in an endless summer.
I don’t even like summer, actually.
Anyway, that’s that for that. I didn’t get much work done yesterday, but I’m hoping to make up for it today. Richard Burley’s 43rd birthday just passed. Or is that his sixth? It’s so hard to keep count.
Thank you for reading.
Lee.