Spoons

[Guest guest]

Have you all heard the spoon theory? It was originally used to explain life

with lupus, and it's been picked up by other people with chronic diseases.

I'm seeing it used in the fibromyalgia forums a lot. Basically, you start

out the day with a certain number of spoons, and each activity you do costs

you one or more spoons. If you run out of spoons, you can't do anything

else but crawl into bed, pretty much. And people with lupus or fibromyalgia

have a lot fewer spoons than most people, so we have to conserve our energy

and endurance and choose what we spend our spoons on.

I was just thinking that the spoon theory could apply to autism as well.

Most of us have a limit on how much stimulation we can stand before we have

to turn it off. The more people are around us and demanding our attention,

the faster we get overloaded. I think the spoon idea works here, too. What

do you think?

Elayne