So the Spoon Theory is a fundamental metaphor used often in the chronic pain/chronic illness communities to explain to non-spoonies why life is harder for them. It’s super useful and we use that all the time.
But it has a corollary.
You know the phrase, “Stick a fork in me, I’m done,” right?
Well, Fork Theory is that one has a Fork Limit, that is, you can probably cope okay with one fork stuck in you, maybe two or three, but at some point you will lose your shit if one more fork happens.
A fork could range from being hungry or having to pee to getting a new bill or a new diagnosis of illness. There are lots of different sizes of forks, and volume vs. quantity means that the fork limit is not absolute. I might be able to deal with 20 tiny little escargot fork annoyances, such as a hangnail or slightly suboptimal pants, but not even one “you poked my trigger on purpose because you think it’s fun to see me melt down” pitchfork.
This is super relevant for neurodivergent folk. Like, you might be able to deal with your feet being cold or a tag, but not both. Hubby describes the situation as “It may seem weird that I just get up and leave the conversation to go to the bathroom, but you just dumped a new financial burden on me and I already had to pee, and going to the bathroom is the fork I can get rid of the fastest.”
I like this and also I like the low key point that you may be able to cope with bigger forks by finding little ones you can remove quickly. A combination of time, focus, and reduction to small stressors that can allow you to focus on the larger stressor in a constructive way.
I keep seeing people apologize for this but I legit don’t care if anyone spam likes/reblogs me or if they go through my old ass posts like I’m just glad you’re having a good time lookin at my content buddy you keep being you
Seriously I appreciate your concern but you’re feeding my ego in the most harmless way
[ID: screenshot of a tweet from user donfrijole that says: “One of the weirder things about being an adult is having a favorite stovetop burner, yet nobody talks about it.” /end ID]
I think the real problem here is that big media corporations seem to believe that social media userbases are fungible, and persist in acting on this belief no matter how many times it’s demonstrated to be wrong.
There’s a specific pattern of events that plays out over and over (and over) again, and it looks something like this:
1. Social media platform becomes popular
2. Social media platform is purchased by big media corporation in order to gain access to it large user base
3. Big media corporation realises that social media platform’s demographics are not the demographics they want to sell things to.
4. Big media corporation institutes measures to drive away “undesirable” users, apparently in the honest belief that the outgoing users will automatically be replaced by an equal number of new, more demographically desirable users
5. This does not, in fact, occur
6. Social media platform crashes and burns
You’d think that, by the sheer law of averages, at least one person who’s capable of learning from experience would become involved in this whole process at some point.
