Spoons

I hadn't come across spoon theory before (already, I see, like most things on the modern Internet, the subject of complaints about appropriation, trivialization, and who is more victimised than whom...)

It does echo in a way what I feel, which I've been categorising to myself as an endless litany of "but I'm so tired"... but where 'tired' doesn't represent lack of sleep or physical aches, but of constant, dragging effort to do anything at all difficult, where 'difficult' is almost invariably emotional rather than objectively hard. It's somewhat like what I've always thought of as 'push', of which one only has so much before becoming completely dispirited.

But it isn't that I can't. It isn't that I don't have the energy. It isn't even, in most cases, that it's a matter of doing something which I find actively daunting or frightening (like going to complain about things, or dealing with angry people). It really does feel from my perspective like laziness and lack of self-discipline, because I know perfectly well that if I had someone standing over me to disapprove then I *would* do these things; things as simple as answering emails, which, once I start, I indeed tend to do at some length, or as complex as finding and fixing bugs in a program, or as necessary as washing-up or mending clothes.( Read more... )