Keep your hopes up high and your head down low.

Obviously not in a positive light.

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.

The student said that one day she was out riding her horse and there were a lot of rabbits around, occasionally leaping out of the grass onto the trail. A lot of horses would be scared out of their minds by this kind of thing, but her horse wasn’t phased by it. They saw a dozen rabbits and the horse didn’t react, but the thirteenth time they saw a rabbit the horse freaked out and bucked her off.

She thought this was weird that the horse got scared only on the thirteenth rabbit, after not having reacted to twelve of them. Schiller understood that each of those rabbits really was scaring the horse, who was masking his worry pretty well for a while. He was able to handle twelve rabbits, but thirteen was too much.

The way to keep your horse from melting down due to this kind of accumulated stress is to not let it accumulate. Be in touch with your horse’s mental and emotional state so that if something scary happens you can make sure he’s really okay with it (not just stifling it) before you go on. You can help your horse manage the rabbits so that he doesn’t pass his rabbit limit.

If you as a human are keeping track of all your rabbits (or forks) it’s absolutely worthwhile to remove whichever ones you can, if it keeps you from getting to your limit.

#it’s actually a comedy