Subsisting in Safe Mode: Updating the ‘Spoons Theory’

In my previous post, I talked a little bit about some of my more recent health challenges, including extreme fatigue, lethargy and increased pain. Having just returned from a visit with the oncologist yesterday, I’m excited to celebrate being tumour free now for just over two years. With a clear CT scan, it’s back to my family physician and I to work together to find a solution to the problem. Of course, that doesn’t mean I haven’t already been doing things to mitigate the challenges of that come with being a sleepyhead. I’d like to tell you a little bit about how I’ve put my own twist on a popular coping method for people with chronic illnesses.

One of the more common ways of making the accompanying low energy of chronic illness relatable is the Spoons Theory. Originally proposed as an easier way of explaining how much of the day can be spent simply managing energy, the theory has taken on a life of its own, and is now widely understood to be a helpful way of explaining energy loss and chronic illness to friends and family.

Instead of talking about spoons, though, I’m going to quote from a recent blog post by Michelle at The Mighty, who helps to update the analogy a bit. Here’s her Cellphone Theory:

Basically, you own a cell phone with a bad battery. It doesn’t matter how long it charges — it’s never quite full. Honestly, it’s hard to predict how much juice you’re going to have when you grab it in the morning. Maybe it’s 83 percent. Maybe it’s only 39 percent. And that’s all you have…. Maybe you put the phone in battery-saver mode and sacrifice some functionality in favor of longevity, or maybe you burn hard for two hours and are left at the end of the day with a busted radiator, in the rain, and no way to easily call for a tow.

Perhaps you could bring along chargers, but then you’re always hunting for that free outlet at the back of a room. Now imagine it malfunctioning, in and out of airplane mode. The phone is physically in one piece and all the apps are there, but they can’t function. Or how about the stupid thing sometimes just crashes? Boom, black screen, and now it has to reboot. Maybe some wires are loose, so the display flickers and doesn’t adjust properly to changes in light. Possibly some of the software is glitchy, so it can’t process texts or answer a call unless you first open the calculator app. What if you picked up a virus or key logger, and some of that energy is now being eaten by a malignant thing that destroys your phone’s operating system and steals your identity?

One of the challenges, Michelle later notes, is that it can be hard to explain to those who insist that there are so many hours in a day, that this is just simple conservation of energy. It’s more than that.

“Since everyone has experienced a tech glitch — or running low on flatware — it’s sometimes difficult to make someone understand that this is different. This is constant, and there’s no replacing the phone.”

In the original analogy, spoons could be borrowed, but only at a cost — the next day I’d have to make it up, with interest. In this one, the phone is permanently damaged. Where most other people get a full charge in the morning or start the day with a fresh set of spoons, I don’t have that luxury now that I live with chronic pain.

It’s really hard to accept that this means I fail at things more often than I did before.

Indeed, when it comes to this cellphone thing, I run out of battery or serve up a software glitch often:

• I’ll leave an event early, or withdraw to the corner for a few minutes alone.
• I’ll forget what I’m saying in the middle of a sentence.
• I’ll fall asleep on the floor hugging my dog or sleep for 20 out of the day’s 24 hours.
• Sometimes I call off a planned meeting, effusively apologizing for my inconsiderate body.
• Other times, I have to call emergency meetings, because of said inconsiderate body.
• And finally, my nightmares prevent me from fully resting each night, as if my overnight charge is interrupted by a power surge, erasing whatever juice I may have already gained. Waking up in covered in sweat, rolled into a ball, screaming is not usually a great way to rest and recharge and while the meds help, they’re not perfect

There are things that I can do to mitigate many of these, and trust me, I do them. If anything, those around me too frequently suggest that I’m guilty of taking an overly critical view of myself, creating self-imposed and unrealistic expectations. Indeed, this has been where my healing faces obstacles, especially in my mind.

I’m not the kind of guy who likes to hurry up and wait. I mean, none of us do, but others of us really don’t do so well. From the moment I first became sick, I faced a long, hard road back. Of course, I had no idea, at the time that there was no such thing as a long way back, just a slow, methodical way forward, as if I were forever tied to a debugger. In this way, my cellphone of a body has been on Safe Mode for some time.

I’m told that software debuggers are responsible for going through code, line by line, checking each one to make sure that the glitch in the machine isn’t found in that code. When they find some bad code, they then go through the sometimes trial-and-error process of figuring out how to fix it. Once that piece of code is fixed, they send it off to the testers, who put the program through its paces, again. If another bug is found, the debuggers must do it all over again. And while some of this can be automated, at the end of the day, it’s the software debugger that is responsible for finding and fixing it.

Indeed, it can take months of arduous painstaking work to go through all this code, which is why many smartphone builders hire their human debuggers as co-op students and first year hires. It’s tedious work, but it’s necessary work, and at the end of the experience, a young software developer is better able to adapt to issues that might come up in the future, if only because they’ve spent so much time going through the code.

Of course, I’m not at all a software developer, so real life forces me to offer it as an imperfect analogy, helping me to add my own twist to the Cellphone Theory:

In my current liminal state, I feel like I’m a lot like a cellphone in safe mode. Instead of trying to imagine myself as a malfunctioning cellphone, I’d instead like to imagine that I am safe inside a software debugger’s arms somewhere, a software creation in Safe Mode, while the bugs literally get worked through.

It also provides me with the knowledge and understanding that I am a work in progress, perhaps even a long work in progress. My health journey has been far from what I ever imagined my life to be, but it has provided me with so many learning opportunities that I’d never turn away for the life of me.

I don’t know that I’m yet at the stage of being okay with a body currently in a sort of Safe Mode stasis. I have no idea when it will end. All I must believe, and all my experience has told me thus far, is that, slowly but surely, the bugs will be worked out.