This is super relevant for neurodivergent folk. Like, you might be able to deal with your feet being cold or a tag, but not both. Hubby describes the situation as “It may seem weird that I just get up and leave the conversation to go to the bathroom, but you just dumped a new financial burden on me and I already had to pee, and going to the bathroom is the fork I can get rid of the fastest.”

A fork could range from being hungry or having to pee to getting a new bill or a new diagnosis of illness. There are lots of different sizes of forks, and volume vs. quantity means that the fork limit is not absolute. I might be able to deal with 20 tiny little escargot fork annoyances, such as a hangnail or slightly suboptimal pants, but not even one “you poked my trigger on purpose because you think it’s fun to see me melt down” pitchfork.

Well, Fork Theory is that one has a Fork Limit, that is, you can probably cope okay with one fork stuck in you, maybe two or three, but at some point you will lose your shit if one more fork happens.

So the Spoon Theory is a fundamental metaphor used often in the chronic pain/chronic illness communities to explain to non-spoonies why life is harder for them. It’s super useful and we use that all the time.

This is copied nearly verbatim from my Tumblr, from whence it managed to become Facebook viral.

From Tumblr reactions to this, we got a few new words and phrases, the best of which is probably “Forkupine”. The grand unification is “Spork theory”.

One person came up with a corollary of the corollary, a “dish” theory, about the idea of “load bearing supports”, i.e. things that help in case of lack of spoons, or things that protect you from being stuck by a fork.

Having words for a thing often makes it easier to cope.

This is not unlike the idea of the straw that broke the camel’s back, but I find it a more functional and hopeful metaphor, because it tells us that when the forks are removed, in whatever order, we can cope better. A broken back is a broken back, and implies helplessness.

ETA:A couple people have asked if they can use the Fork Theory if they’re not (fill in whatever, I don’t care.)

The short answer is, “Of course.”

I’d like to just say that gatekeeping takes up too much energy, uses too many spoons and sticks forks in people.

Both hubby and I deal with chronic mental and physical health issues. Mine are more obvious–severe rheumatoid arthritis on top of a stack of other issues will do that to you. But “running out of spoons” happens even to people who do have the physical ability to exercise, for example. Just because someone starts out their day with more spoons, or bigger spoons, doesn’t mean they can’t run out. And EVERYONE has a fork limit.

This was designed to be a corollary, not a substitute, and I would not for a second limit who could use this idea. Everyone, disabled or not, has limits to what they can take.

In fact, the difference, in many cases, between an able-bodied person and a disabled person, between a person without mental health diagnoses and someone with mental health diagnoses is very small, and can be encompassed by one word.

The word?

YET.

You live long enough, life is going to throw trauma your way. You live long enough, you will experience disability.

And if you don’t, well, apparently you are terminally unlucky.

Seriously, gatekeeping this particular thing is a zero sum game and I really wish people wouldn’t. We need the curb cutter effect of able-bodied people understanding our metaphors. Of being able to shorthand something and have someone else go, “Ah, I understand.”

It’s tempting for me, with how disabled I am, how much more disabled I’ve been at times, to think, “Oh, no one could really understand how bad this is” with the undercurrent of (I assume I’m handling this badly compared to everyone else, but if I’m the only one feeling this way, and others don’t understand, then it’s not my fault.)

The fact of the matter is that disability is hard, and isolating and literally anyone who went through what I have gone through would have a hard time with it. I don’t have to feel guilty about not dealing very well with it.

My sister said to me once, and it stuck with me forever, “This shit is objectively hard.”

And yeah, RA is. Lupus is. Thyroiditis and Ehlers Danlos and allergies and asthma and sleep apnea and depression and isolation and dealing with the current political situation and worrying about money and stressing about jobs and kids and and and and… this stuff is hard. Lots of people can deal okay with a couple of issues, some people deal gracefully with some huge issues and most of us? Just muddle along doing our best and it would behoove us to assume that others are also trying.

We discover in our online communities commonality of experience, that we are not alone in our not-dealing-very-well, that when some people are dealing better it may be because they have more resources or know information that they can share with others.

If we forget that the reason we come together is for understanding, and start to shut people out… we’re just part of someone else’s bad day. And I’d rather not.

(Oh, and as for the knife theory, it’s pretty damn simple… in this context, knives are the things you bleed from when you pull them out, the things that make triggers, the lasting traumas, the actual aggression. They’re the things you may need medical or mental health attention to heal from.)