That which the sea breaks against

so it’s no wonder that when she got the chance Ellen took up a talk show that allowed her to build a reputation as a friendly, happy, and utterly harmless character. since coming out, she has steered almost explicitly away from politics, especially from focusing too much on being a lesbian. she is just a friendly, smiling, liberal-leaning and generous talk show host, almost apolitical and tiptoeing around controversy where her peers (Stephen Colbert, James Corden, Conan O’Brien, John Oliver, Trevor Noah, etc.) have been able to be explicitly political.

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. But it has a corollary.  You know the phrase, “Stick a fork in me, I’m done,” right? 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.  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.