The Spoon Theory
There was no blog post last week because I was all out of spoons. The Spoon Theory, created by Christine Miserandino, is a way to describe living with a chronic illness. In her case, this is Lupus. She wrote a blog post explaining it and added that it could be applied to any chronic illness or disability. Since writing her post, the theory has become talked about in many communities, and you can even watch TikToks where individuals explain it and talk about their experiences with it.
My Experience
One of the communities that uses it to describe their lived experiences is the ADHD community, which I recently learned that I am a part of. I was diagnosed with Major Depressive Disorder (depression), Panic Disorder (panic attacks at unpredictable times), and mild Agoraphobia (fear of going out in public, especially if it would be hard to leave) years ago. I have received treatment for these through medication and therapy, and all of them have improved. My depression and panic attacks are very manageable and, as a result, the agoraphobia no longer affects me at all. However, some symptoms that I had always thought were related to the depression and anxiety (because they are symptoms of those disorders) were not going away at all as everything else improved.
These symptoms included restlessness, trouble focusing, memory issues, lack of motivation and impulsivity among a few others. Sometimes I would get an idea into my head and then immediately take action with no thought or planning and work on it until that thing was completed. Other times, I would have a goal that I REALLY wanted to accomplish, had thought about how I needed to do it when I had time for days/weeks/months, and then find the time but not the will to do it. Instead, I would sit in a catatonic state for sometimes hours and wonder what the hell was wrong with me. I would wonder, "Is my depression a misdiagnosis? Do I really have Bipolar Disorder where I would experience highs and lows? No, that doesn't fit right, so I must just be lazy."
Sometimes I would be so focused on listening to what someone is saying that my inner dialogue of, "Make eye contact and pay attention to what they are saying. This sounds like it is important so you don't want to miss it. Oh no, you have missed everything so far. You are a terrible listener. Now they are done talking and you are supposed to respond. If you were a good person, you would have caught everything that they said so you would know what to say back," would drown everything else out. I would talk about one of my experiences to seem empathetic because I was once told that sharing a similar experience you had could help someone feel like you know what they are going through and, since I wanted to support the friend I'm talking to, that seemed like a good idea, but then my words would take off on their own and not stop even as I would think to myself, "Shut up. Shut up. You are monopolizing this conversation and making it all about you. Get back on topic to what they were telling you about." These actions made me feel like I was a bad friend.
I would forget about and miss important appointments that I had been anxiously waiting for. I would spend irresponsibly on things I would later resent for taking up space. I would buy groceries and forget about them until they had already gone bad and then beat myself up for wasting food as well as the money that I spent on that food. I would finally get around to organizing my things by putting them in the closet, in a bin, in a drawer, but then I would forget they existed and buy another one because I forgot that I already had one. This led me to believe that I was irresponsible and unorganized.
While I am not trying to excuse these behaviours, and I am actively working on all of them, I now know that they are a result of ADHD. These things were symptoms: hyper-focus, impaired executive functioning, inattentiveness, hyperactivity, forgetfulness, and impulsivity, and lack of object constancy. Now, we were just discussing how some people are ashamed of being diagnosed with a mental disorder but, as Taylor Tomlinson said in her Netflix special Look at You, "it's just information about you that helps you know how to take better care of yourself." You can find clips of this message all over, and I encourage you to watch it. Learning that I have ADHD has changed my life in all of the best ways. Instead of beating myself up for struggling with those symptoms, I can see that I was doing my best to cope with an undiagnosed disorder without treatment. Also, because I know that I have it, I kind find coping solutions. One of them is medication, but I have also found some great tips online:
Work with yourself instead of against yourself. This came from How to ADHD on YouTube. The example she used was actually something I did. If you tend to throw your coat on the nearest surface when you come home, put a coat rack there, but you could apply this to all kinds of things.
Also from How to ADHD, put things in your environment as clues to remind you to do something. Her example was that she likes to practice the ukulele while sitting on the couch so she put her ukulele beside the couch. I like to cut the dogs' nails while we are all relaxed on the couch watching tv, so I put the nail clippers on the coffee table to remind me to do it. For a while, even before I knew I had ADHD, kept a bag of dog treats on top of the bookshelf in the living room, and I got so much training done when that was there because it would cue me to work on training.
Another great tip came from @dustychipura on TikTok, which she called "lightning in a bottle" and it was to watch things that trigger your hyper-focus when you need to be motivated to do something. If I need to take care of my plants, I would watch YouTube videos from people like Good and Planty to get me all inspired about plant care. If I wanted to teach a trick to one of my dogs, I could read the list of tricks for different titles on Do More With Your Dog!'s website.
Back to The Spoon Theory
In a nutshell, The Spoon Theory states that you have a certain amount of spoons each day and each task that you undertake requires a certain number of spoons. A perfectly healthy person would have so many spoons that they wouldn't even notice them going throughout the day. For those living with chronic physical or mental illness, disabilities, fatigue, etc., the number of spoons they have is limited and some activities may require more spoons than they would for the average person. For me, just thinking about the steps involved with a task uses up spoons, making it even harder to actually do those things.
My medication has helped me in the sense that it makes it take fewer spoons to complete each task. On my meds, I no longer use up so many spoons just thinking about doing a task, which means that I have more spoons to spend on actually doing things. However, when my medication wears off, I crash and drop however many spoons I have left. If I'm lucky, might manage to catch one last spoon before it hits the floor to use to get through the day. To compensate, I've started taking my medication midday so that the crash hits later, but that means that I am still using up a lot of spoons before it kicks in. I'm speaking to my doctor about this the day that this post goes live, so hopefully that will help.
In the past few weeks, I have needed to use more spoons. My weekends have been busy so instead of being able to save up some extra spoons to use throughout the week, I've used them up. I have visited family, had a weekend getaway, and done dog stuff, all of which were things I wanted to do and enjoyed, but they still required spoons. I also looked after my roommate's dog, Sunday, while my roommate was in Ireland for a week and a half. I was happy to do it, but the change in routine used up an extra spoon or two each day. I actually bought a meal kit subscription to save me the spoons needed for meal planning and ordering groceries, and the meals were delicious, but they required lots of spoons to cook.
With spending all of these extra spoons, I was left without enough to perform basic parts of my regular routine, which resulted in my space being more cluttered than usual. Once my routine was (mostly) back to normal, I decided to dedicate some spoons to de-cluttering, but the spoons that were used to declutter had to come from somewhere. So there was no blog post last week, I am behind in one of my university classes and on some chores, and I still have not finished de-cluttering. I am now also using up spoons on the guilt and shame that I feel for being unable to keep up. That being said, The Spoon Theory has made me more forgiving of myself so I am not using quite as many spoons on guilt and shame as I would have in the past.
Moving Forward
Dog care and training requires spoons. Mealtime is the biggest priority, so a spoon is always allocated towards that, but other things we do are easy to put on the back burner when I get behind on my bare minimum of responsibilities. I have a lot that I want to accomplish with barknbuck this year, and it is a lot of work. I know that the work I put in now will pay off in the long run, but I am using up a lot of spoons on it right now. I am working on evaluating my priorities so as to save my spoons for those things. Right now my main priorities are, in no particular order, the following:
Work
Eating every day
Basic household chores
Decluttering since my clutter is an active source of stress
Pet care, which includes providing for physical and mental needs
Finalizing my online courses
My Youtube series The ABCs of Dog Training
In order to allocate enough spoons to each of these tasks, I am going to be cutting back on other things. Most are in my personal life, but I have decided that one of them will be the regularly scheduled blog posts. This does not mean that I will not be posting at all, but I am going to temporarily let go of my schedule and deadlines so that I can get ahead on a few other things. Once I catch up, I will come back to a schedule for posts.
I am by no means an expert in this area, and I do not have the answers. What I do have are experiences that I can share to hopefully make others feel less alone in their struggles. Not even that long ago, I would have felt like a failure for not sticking to my goal of posting regularly. Fortunately, I am now in a place where I can forgive myself for needing to re-think my priorities. What I would like any readers to do is think to themselves, "Do I think that Sophie is a failure as a human for taking a break from her blog?" If you answered no, then make sure you lend that same understanding and self-acceptance when you need to take a break from something too.
Dogs
Now, this is a blog about dogs, so I want to connect the messages in this post to some training tips.
Dogs are also living creatures, so they also only have a certain number of spoons each day. There is that old saying that "a tired dog is a good dog," but tired dogs are actually left with no more spoons to make good decisions. If all they have left to do in a day is snooze on the couch, this may not be an issue, but it will affect them if they have to make good choices on walks, at the vet, when guests come over, etc. While you should be exercising your dog and giving their brains workouts, make sure not to overdo it. Also, remember to include management in your training plan so that each good choice requires your dog to use fewer spoons.
I recently talked about keeping training sessions short, and it's relevant to this discussion. Training uses up spoons, so make sure to take frequent breaks and keep an eye on your dog so that you know when they are all out of spoons so you can save more training for the next day.
This post also focused a lot on self-acceptance and forgiving yourself when you need a break. I think everyone has had a day where they barely have enough spoons to get through to bedtime, and it is important to remember that our dogs have those days as well. When you have put a lot of work into your training and then see your dog seemingly regress, it is easy to feel like you are an inadequate dog owner (at least that's how I feel sometimes). Just remember that those days happen to everyone, humans and canines alike.
One thing that helps me when I am running low on spoons is getting help. My wonderful boyfriend sometimes surprises me by beating me home from work and shovelling my driveway. A close friend of mine came to my aid when I told her I was struggling to motivate myself to do a task. Instacart has given me an alternative to venturing out to the grocery store. All of these things save me spoons. If you are struggling with your dogs, you can ask for help. A dog walker can save you some spoons by exercising your dog for you and hiring a trainer can help you learn how to use your spoons more efficiently when problem-solving an unwanted behaviour.
Finally, remember to be easy on yourself when you are having trouble keeping up with everything that you want to do. My dogs and I certainly go through periods where things just kind of suck for a little bit. I can have a hard time following through on my training goals as well, and I have to come up with solutions to overcome that. What I have found, though, is that having empathy towards yourself and your dogs means that you get out of those funks soon. Once I got past beating myself up for "failing" Zero and accepted that I was unable to provide him with what he needed, I was able to take action and improve the situation.
Conclusion
Just when I thought I couldn't be any more vulnerable on this blog, I wrote this piece. Part of me is unsure about whether or not I should share something so personal, but I think I have to. My whole goal for this blog was to be a voice; to tell people that it is okay to struggle with raising your dog when most of the stories you see about dogs talk about them being perfect, being man's best friend, and being the saving grace that saves us all from a life of misery. While I do agree that dogs are wonderful, I worry that only seeing those messages makes people feel like there is something wrong with them if their experience isn't quite so picture-perfect. I know that I certainly do not feel good when I am struggling with my mental health and see posts full of toxic positivity that say things like, "The only thing standing in the way of your goals is you!" or some other message that implies you are a lazy piece of shit who deserves to be unhappy if you are struggling to get out of bed in the morning, let alone take on the challenge of changing your entire life while simultaneously making enough money to pay your bills and finding the energy to keep yourself alive. Since I've seen how being inundated with highlight reels of dog ownership has affected my students, I wanted to put a different message out there. I also tend to overshare anyway, so I might as well put that to good use. Sometimes things just suck; but that's okay, that's normal, and you will get through it.
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