Spoonie Writer: Stretching Your Limits

SPOONIE WRITER: STRETCHING YOUR LIMITS

One thing that is very important when it comes to being a spoonie is knowing what your limits are and sticking to them. It's something I've been told many many times over the years by doctors, physios and friends and family alike. You need to stick within those limits because pushing yourself will lead to a flare, and I know no one wants that.

So with that in mind, I wanted to talk today about maybe not pushing your limits, but nudging them ever so slightly every so often so that you can maybe branch out and see if things have changed and if you can manage more. I do want to stress though that this is very much a nudge, not a shove that has you stuck in bed and regretting your life choices.

I have, over the years, gone from writing every so often, to writing pretty much all the time. I do not, and will never, mean every day because everyone has limits, even healthy and abled people would struggle to constantly write every single day. I mean that while at the time I was doing uni, and while that obviously had a bigger impact on my time, I found that I just didn't always have the energy to do one thing non writing related and then sit down to write even one page.

We all know how I finally got to the point where I am now. I started with just one page a day, and even then I didn't write every day. It allowed me to give that tiny nudge to my body and see just where it drew the line. I went from nudging to write, to nudging to write more. I always stopped nudging for a long while to allow my body time to adjust or flip out, whichever it was going to do, and once I was sure that it could take more, I would give it another small nudge and the same, on and on.

So when I sit here and tell you that I work for at most three hours in one day, you can see how that nudge became a little more and a little more, and now I'm in a place where I'm mostly on track with where I need to be. It's taken a very very long time, and I do not advocate for rushing through it. The thing some abled and healthy people don't get is it's very much a case of the mind, mostly, being willing but the body very much is not. It's not a case of choosing to spend the remainder of my day in bed recharging, but that I need to do that to be able to function.

While, over the years, my health has fluctuated to a point where I don't know where I'll be in six months health wise, let alone a year, I have found my sweet spot and I'm really happy to have done so. It means that I can get the majority of my work down in a month, and still have those days off because those are necessary for everyone, but especially so for spoonies.

So what's my advice? Nudge slow, give yourself a lot of time to adjust, there is not a time limit here, and take it easy. Sometimes you will go backwards, and that's okay. You got this. You'll get there.

Any questions? Lemme know in the comments!

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