A Dirge for Heavy Spoons
The spoon sat in the drawer, unremarkable as the other cutlery. I plucked it without thought, as one does, as countless others have before me. Smooth steel, bowl-shaped end, utilitarian. But when I left it on the counter and walked away, I found my eyes drawn back. The curve seemed... wrong. Too deep, too narrow, as though it were designed for something with a mouth unlike mine. A sliver of light bent across its surface, warped into angles my brain refused to settle on, angles that trembled and pulsed li...
A spoon is an object so ordinary it resists notice: stainless steel, resting in a drawer among its kind. The curve of a the good spoon illuminates a more hidden nature as metaphor and tools that feed us become that much more. I often pick up a spoon and replace it because it is... off. Its personality is wrong in my hand and I need something real-er. Heavier. More of the mundane earth than the platonic ideal shape created in corporate design rooms (if we're lucky). What once gleamed with resonance now...
Christine Miserandino showed in her landmark essay The Spoon Theory, the spoon diverged into two realities. That of a real, unit measure of energy consumed by our bodies in a soup or a sauce. And as a metaphysical unit of measure for capacity, fatigue, survival. She placed them on a café table before a friend, distributing them one by one to represent the finite energy available in a day living with lupus. Each spoon was a ration, a currency. When the spoons ran out, so did the day. 1
But metaphors mutate. Disability scholars have noted that "spoonie" identity---adopted proudly by many---has also been co-opted into memes and hashtags, blunting its edge. The spoon, once sacred currency, risks becoming a parody token when wielded casually by those who do not feel its weight.2 We did not forge the spoon for them. We held it as covenant, a secret weight passed palm to palm. Now it rattles loose in the drawers of strangers.
The metaphor spread quickly because it was relatable. Metaphors thrive not only on clarity but on their portability across bodies and communities. To explain one's exhaustion as "being out of spoons" was to offer both disclosure and shorthand, an uncanny ability to translate invisible experience into the everyday.3 But metaphors, like bodies, do not remain untouched. They are devoured by culture, gnawed until only fragments remain.
The reflection in its hollow began to diverge from me. Not a mirror, but a window. My face elongated, blurred, eyelids fluttering too many times. It smiled when I did not.
I tried to close the drawer, bury it among its kin, but the other spoons recoiled, slid away with an oily screech. They would not touch it. I understand now: it is not my spoon. It never was. It was left here, forgotten---or perhaps remembered too much.
As it further spreads across the general zeitgeist, the social internet has co-opted it further. Now, the spoon becomes the embodiment of autistic personality---a right spoon and a wrong spoon that dilutes the personal spoon it used to represent. I see, infrequently, "this is my spoon" to guard against the meaning floating away into the ether. Yet we cannot bar the drawer. The spoons will be taken, reshaped, sold back to us as trinkets.
The drawer of utensils becomes a reliquary of rationed days, each spoon humming with exhausted history, yet increasingly touched by hands that cannot sense its vibration. Once, you could feel the hum in your bones. Now it flickers, a faint signal beneath the static of hashtags and punchlines. The meaning that we have begun to share is washing away the power from the communities that need it.
Susan Sontag argued of illness metaphors, "the most useful way of regarding illness... is one most resistant to metaphor."4 Yet communities resist the erasure of metaphor because it communicates what clinical language cannot. The spoon remains both ordinary and eldritch---an object that unsettles precisely because it renders the invisible visible, the mundane terrifyingly profound. But its song grows weaker. What was once a language of survival becomes background clatter in a kitchen too loud to hear us.
Footnotes
Christine Miserandino, "The Spoon Theory," But You Don't Look Sick, 2003, http://www.butyoudontlooksick.com/articles/written-by-christine/the-spoon-the-theory/↩
Melanie Yergeau, Authoring Autism: On Rhetoric and Neurological Queerness (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018).↩
George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980).↩
Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1978), 3.↩