Episode 3: Spell Slot Theory – Enthusiastic Encouragement & Dubious Advice

Patricia: Hey friends, welcome to Enthusiastic Encouragement and Dubious Advice, the podcast for folks who would rather curl into the fetal position than lean in. I’m your host, Patricia Elzie-Tuttle.

Nicole: And I’m your co host, and I just happen to be Patricia’s wife, Nicole Elzie-Tuttle. We’re recording this show on November 19th, 2023.

Patricia: I love how you just happen to be my wife, like it just happened one day, you woke up and we were married.

Nicole: Yeah, kind of. It was a good morning.

Patricia: It was a good morning. So, for folks who are listening that don’t know, one of my side gigs is I podcast about books, and I write about books, and I am a book person, and I am a librarian, and so, publicists often send me advanced reader copies of books and sometimes they are finished copies as well and recently a copy of Barbara Streisand’s new memoir titled My Name is Barbara arrived on our doorstep and I have not yet read it.

This book is 992 pages. It is a beast. It has a bunch of full color photos, and so it is heavy. Like, I don’t know how I’m going to physically read it because I can’t hold it up for long.

Nicole: It is so massive and so heavy.

Patricia: Yeah, and the other thing is, oh, you know, usually with a longer book like that, I will listen to it on audiobook, and I especially like memoirs on audiobook.

The Barbra Streisand memoir is 48 hours long. It is 48 hours long, and it includes some anecdotes in the audiobook that aren’t in the physical book, as well as some music, so even if I turned up the speed on audiobook and listened to it twice as fast, that would still be 24 hours of audiobook.

Nicole: And then you’d also, though, be hearing The chipmunks doing weird Barbra Streisand songs.

Patricia: Yeah, the music would be at twice as sweet. So it would be a whole thing. And I don’t know, it might just be something that I chip away at, or I don’t know. But I, I do want to read it. That’s the thing. I do want to read it. And also talking about celebrity memoirs. I devoured Britney Spears memoir called The Woman in Me.

Nicole: Oh, I just got through that, too.

Patricia: It was a lot. It was a lot. And the whole time I was reading it, and honestly, every time I think about, like, my muscles are tensing right now because I just want to fight everyone in that woman’s life.

Nicole: Also, I’m like, that poor woman needs a hug.

Patricia: Yeah.

Nicole: I want to fight everyone and give her a hug.

Patricia: Yeah, throughout the whole book, it’s just evident that she just wanted to love and be loved and sing and dance and perform.

Nicole: Yeah. It also was just, once the conservatorship kicked in, like, that is horrifying. The idea of going through that just, that is something that terrifies me. It’s almost like, in ways like, almost Kafka-esque or something, just the whole conspiracy around you controlling your whole entire life.

I can’t imagine surviving that. And still having to come out being able to trust people.

Patricia: Yeah, yeah, and I think about the many disabled people currently, who are in various levels of conservatorships, and Britney Spears is perhaps the highest profile one that we all know about, but this happens to non celebrities, too, and I started going down a hole of looking into disability justice and conservatorships and it’s just a labyrinthine legal nightmare system.

Nicole: In some ways, it kind of sounds like the old ways of locking up troublesome women in sanitariums.

Patricia: Ah, difficult women, yes.

Nicole: Yes. Those troublemakers, those difficult women who just won’t listen to their husbands.

Patricia: Well, clearly, if they weren’t listening to their husbands, then there must be something wrong.

Nicole: Well, yeah, their uteruses were roaming all over the place. You gotta, you gotta tack those things down.

Patricia: Tack down your uterus.

Nicole: Yeah.

Patricia: Anyway, I don’t know if I’m going to read another memoir for a while because that one just had me reeling so much

Nicole: yeah

Patricia: that I just need to dive into other books.

Nicole: Yeah.

Patricia: Chew on that one for a while.

But it is narrated by Michelle Williams, and in the beginning of the book, Britney Spears does come on and do, like, a little bit of an intro, and I fully understand and respect why she didn’t narrate this book herself.

Nicole: Oh god, that would… Michelle Williams did an amazing job at narrating it. I think it would break the listener to hear Britney tell it herself, and also, like, be incredibly damaging for her.

Patricia: Absolutely. Absolutely. Just, it would be incredibly traumatic for her to then have to record for dozens of hours.

Nicole: I think it would be incredibly traumatic for everyone involved, including the listener.

Patricia: Right… Right…. Read the Britney Spears memoir. Oh my god.

Nicole: Yes.

Patricia: Read it.

So, today, to talk about what we want to talk about, I need to give you a bunch of background on what is known as spoon theory. So some of you, if you hear the term spoon theory, you automatically know what I’m talking about. And it does strike me as one of those things, either you are familiar with it or you are not.

The idea of spoon theory is from a 2003 essay by Christine Miserandino. Miserandino has lupus, which is a chronic illness, and in the essay she is at a diner with a friend and the friend asks what it’s like to have lupus. In searching for an analogy, she ended up grabbing all the spoons on all the tables within reach.

She says living with chronic illness means having to make choices that folks who do not live with chronic illness have to make. In her words, quote, “Most people start the day with unlimited amount of possibilities and energy to do whatever they desire, especially young people. For the most part, they do not need to worry about the effects of their actions.”

So she grabbed all of these spoons off all these tables, and she handed them all to her friend and told her friend to count them. When you are healthy, you expect to have an unlimited amount of spoons, but when you are living with chronic illness, you have a finite number on any given day, and you need to know how many you have.

She then asked her friend to list the tasks she had to do in a regular day. And then, she started physically taking away the spoons for even the seemingly most mundane things. Like, waking up and getting out of bed, there goes one spoon. Taking a shower, took a spoon. Getting dressed, took a spoon because one of her hands hurt that day, and she couldn’t wear something with fiddly buttons on it.

Every choice needs to be thoroughly considered and managed, and that takes a spoon. At this point, she hadn’t even gotten to work, and she had half her spoons left. So then it was clear she really needed to be deliberate about where the spoons were spent. After the workday, she still needed to get home and make and have dinner, and then she may only have one spoon left.

She could do something fun with that spoon, or she could do a chore, but not both. This is spoon theory. Over the past 20 years, many folks with chronic illness have referred to themselves as spoonies, and the idea of spoon theory is ubiquitous in some circles. So, I do not have chronic illness. And I want to respect the application of this for folks with chronic illness.

I also still recognize that we all have a finite amount of bandwidth. And the word bandwidth is incredibly boring to me. And so I use the term spell slots.

Nicole: Spell slots is a term that we have borrowed from the world of Dungeons and Dragons. In that world, there are characters who can use magic. And since it’s a game, there is a quantifiable amount of magic any given character can use.

And that is represented with spell slots. Spell slots are the number of spells, or the number of spell slots you have, equals the number of spells, or magic, a character can cast before they need to take a rest. The way this works is every time a character wants to cast a spell, or use magic in some way, it will typically cost them one spell slot.

And when characters advance, or they get better at using their magic, they can gain more spell slots, but at the end of any time period, if a character uses up all of those spell slots, they’ve cast all the magic they can. They need to take a long rest before they can use them again.

Patricia: In the game it’s also a bit more complicated.

Like there are different levels of spell slots.

Nicole: Yeah.

Patricia: And we recognize this, but for our usage of the term in real life, we don’t worry about the different levels and things like that. So for me, the number of spell slots I have in any given day depends on context. Not everyone has the same amount of spell slots.

We may not have chronic illness, but we may be dealing with things like grief, or we may be a caretaker of littles or other adults. We may not have slept well the night before, and so the number of spell slots we have in any given day may depend on that.

Nicole: You may also have not had adequate nutrition that day, or be taking a medication that reduces the number of your spell slots.

Also, you may just be stressed out for whatever reason.

Patricia: All the reasons.

Nicole: All the reasons.

Patricia: All the reasons.

Nicole: Gesturing broadly at the world.

Patricia: And I think it also can depend for some people on the season who have Seasonal Affective Disorder, right? You may have more spell slots during one season than you have during another season.

I look at my day, whether it’s my work day, but also my home day. And sometimes your work day will affect the amount of spell slots you have for home things. And so, I look at spell slots as this is the amount of bandwidth I have for any given thing in any day, and if I am kind of using a spell slot to clean the kitchen island.

Then I might not get any writing done that night, or I might not do a full hair wash, or, or what have you.

Nicole: And what this means is, sometimes we need to triage where we spend our spell slots. And triage is a term that is borrowed from the medical world. In the medical world, this is a system of determining who requires the most immediate care.

So the best example of this that I think a lot of people have encountered is in a busy emergency department. This is what happens when you go to an emergency department, it’s busy, you pretty quickly get to see a nurse who maybe checks your temperature, checks your blood pressure, and asks you what you’re doing there that day, but then she just sends you out to sit in the waiting room some more.

And what they’re doing is triaging. They’re not serving people on a first come, first served basis, but instead looking at who needs to be seen first, due to how urgent or emergent their problem is. They’re triaging and making sure the things that need to get done most urgently are those that get done.

And this is one of the ways we look at how we’re going to spend our spell slots on any given day.

Patricia: Right, so we have X amount of things to do, and we have Y amount of spell slots. So we triage, like things like I was mentioning. Sometimes, as we mentioned in the last episode, deciding what to have for dinner, much less making dinner, can take a whole spell slot.

Nicole: Right. The other thing that happens sometimes is we may over or underestimate how many spell slots it takes to do something. And this is another aspect of using them that we haven’t fully hit on quite yet. But there may be some activities that end up using up more than one spell slot because they took just that much more effort than you thought they would.

Patricia: Absolutely. There was a recipe I made the other day that it said it was quick and easy, that it would take a half an hour, and it took me three hours to make. So, like, there went my evening.

Nicole: Yeah, I’m still wondering about that. Like, did the person who make it have a sous chef or something? Like, who prepped all the chopping and everything?

Patricia: I also chop really slowly because I am terrified of cutting myself.

Nicole: That’s fair.

Patricia: I’m a slow chopper.

Nicole: That’s okay.

Patricia: I’m a slow chopper.

Nicole: I am too. I like you with all of your fingers attached.

Patricia: Thanks. I do my best. So, the way that this definitely diverges from spoon theory is that for folks who don’t necessarily have chronic illness is that we more likely have ways that are accessible to us to replenish our spell slots.

And the way of replenishing your spell slots depends on the individual, right? So it could be your typical food, hydration, rest, or maybe for some people it is listening to certain music, or making certain music.

Nicole: And for some people, things like exercise may refill a spell slot, where for others it might take one away.

Patricia: Absolutely. Sometimes I underestimate the power of going outside for five minutes…

Nicole: Oh my gosh.

Patricia: …in helping replenish like at least one spell slot. And the same with if you have any hobbies or something that we are, I don’t want to say that we’re really big on, but that tends to really do us a solid in replenishing our spell slots, is going somewhere new.

Whether it is a new restaurant, a new store, a new beach, a new botanical garden, like something. Just the novelty of newness improves my bandwidth to do other things.

Nicole: Yeah, getting out of the house and going someplace different really does me well, too.

Patricia: And like I said, these, these ways of replenishment all depend on the individual, so for some people that might sound like an absolute nightmare, and leaving the house actually depletes their spell slots.

Nicole: Right. And for some people, hanging out, watching TV is a real replenishment. It revitalizes a bit, where for myself, like if I spend too long just sitting and watching TV or something, it drains me.

Patricia: Which is funny cause I, I feel the same way, but then I will sit and read a book for hours.

Nicole: Oh, absolutely.

Patricia: And it replenishes me. So again, it depends on the context, it depends on the person, and it is really helpful, I think, to recognize what these things are, you know, to have a menu for yourself of these are the things that replenish my spell slots. And so if you are feeling low, you have something to turn to instead of getting in the, I don’t know, I just feel like crap spiral, which I definitely get into.

Nicole: And that’s one area where it also helps in communicating with the people around you, your partners, your friends, and this is a way that we use it a lot in our home, is saying like, hey, I’m running low on spell slots right now. And that’s a way to communicate, saying like, I don’t have the energy, I don’t have the bandwidth, I don’t have what it takes to help you achieve whatever it is you are asking me to help with.

But it’s also a signal for the other person to maybe step in and help find some of those replenishing areas. And so being able to recognize or listen to your person saying, “Hey, I’m running low on spell slots.” You can go, ah,

Patricia: Have you had any cheese lately?

Nicole: Have you had any cheese lately. Right, like knowing what some of those are for your person can really help elevate your interactions in your relationships.

Patricia: That kind of leads me to the next little section, which sometimes I think that the internet was a mistake. And sometimes I think the internet is amazing. And one of the amazing, lovely things that I find on the internet are the different analogies for how we think about caring for ourselves. You know, there are memes that go around that say we are just complicated houseplants, we’re just houseplants with feelings.

So we need sun, water, food, maybe, you know, some hygiene to be dusted, and maybe to be talked to once in a while.

Nicole: Another analogy that I really like that I’ve seen coming through the internet is almost thinking of ourselves as animals in zoo enclosures. And this was a big one that came out of the lockdown period of the pandemic in that animals in zoos need a lot of what’s called enrichment.

This is activities or new items being placed in their enclosure to keep them active and keep their minds active. So this may be different kinds of food, different toys, or things to do in the home. If you don’t provide constant and varying enrichment, the animals almost become depressed. And I feel like it’s the same way for us sometimes, in that if we’re just at home and there’s no variability in the enrichment available to us, sometimes I get a little sad.

Patricia: Yeah, I think it goes back to the novelty, to the new things,

Nicole: Yes.

Patricia: the going new places, but I think it’s also in the home for us eating new foods, and I understand for some people new foods are an absolute nightmare, like I get that.

And. Again, it depends on the people, but yeah, new food, new flavor of tea, new music even.

Nicole: Ooh, yeah. It’s also one of those things where you’ll catch on and just be like, hey, maybe we should go for a walk. Just change that scenery for a little bit, and it tends to go a long ways.

Patricia: And one of my favorite analogies for how we think about caring for ourselves, I always say to people is that if we don’t stop to rest, our bodies will do it for us.

And the analogy is like your computer or your laptop or what have you needs a system reset or some kind of software update and so you constantly get these pop ups that say you need an update. Do you want to schedule it now or do you want to snooze it and we’ll remind you tomorrow and sometimes we get in the habit of snoozing those pop ups or remind us later.

Eventually, if you do that too many times, your laptop is just going to do the update whether you like it or not.

Nicole: The worst is when it happens in the middle of working on a project.

Patricia: Right, right. And so it’s trying to recognize these red flags in our own lives of saying, I need to step back from something, or I need a nap, or I need some water, or I need some kind of rest.

Or again, enrichment, because if you don’t pause and do what you need to do for yourself, your body is going to take the pause for you, probably in the form of either illness, like maybe you catch a cold, or just exhaustion. Sometimes it is an emotional shutdown, or a panic attack, or something like that, if you, if you don’t take the time.

Nicole: Yeah, I think for me it’s often a meltdown, just suddenly unable to do anything, think anything, be helpful around the house in any possible way, and I just need to go sit down and maybe have a snack, some water.

Patricia: Yeah. Mine also, as you know, happens in the form of meltdowns and I’m not talking about, you know, my meltdowns aren’t 7:00 PM at Disneyland meltdowns that you see a five-year-old do after a long day.

Which, I don’t blame kids at all. It is, it is a lot to be at Disneyland for a full day, but it is usually just almost like a zoning out

Nicole: mmm-hmmm

Patricia: and a crankiness,

Nicole: Yeah

Patricia: and a inability to make any decisions. And I think that is the hallmark of when I know I’m mid meltdown, is if I suddenly just say I don’t know to a lot of things.

Nicole: mmm-hmm.

Patricia: If I can’t make a decision, if I don’t know what to do next, if I’m just roaming around the house looking lost, just haunting the house. I, I’m like, okay, maybe it’s time for some cheese.

Nicole: Maybe it’s time to find one of those things that replenish your spell slots because you’re all out of them.

Patricia: Yeah, again, I think the idea around spell slots is it helps give us a framework for how we look at our bandwidth in any given day and to have on hand ideas of what replenishes the spell slots. And also, I think having that introspection about what we reasonably have the spell slots to do any given time, any given day, because we are all a finite resource.

Nicole: Yeah, you know, it sounds simple and I haven’t done this, but I feel like maybe I need to just put a sticky note on the fridge of like, here’s four ways that I can replenish a spell slot for myself.

Patricia: Yeah.

Nicole: Yeah.

Patricia: Or even little questions wrapped… Just post it notes around the house that say, have you eaten? Have you stood up from your chair?

Nicole: Whoa, hey, standing up from the chair?

Patricia: Which, again, not accessible for everyone, but for me, it is, and it does wonders for my mood to not be sitting all day.

Nicole: Same. It helps a lot. Also helps to stand up and stretch a little bit as I sit like a curled over little shrimp all day at my desk.

Patricia: Now I want to share a resource. None of these resources are sponsored, like if there are ever any links to Bookshop or Amazon or whatever in the show notes, they are affiliate links, but I want to talk about the diverse bookstore searches on both Libro.fm and Bookshop.org. Libro.fm is an audiobook app and it is an alternative to something like Audible.

With Libro.fm you can choose the bookstore that you want a portion of your purchase to go towards. So you could support a local independent bookstore with your Libro.fm purchase. And the same with Bookshop.org, but Bookshop has physical books. They also, as I’ve noticed, have like tarot decks and oracle decks and other things that publishers publish.

Both sites have the ability not just to look for bookshops by geographic area. So if you want to also support a local bookshop, they also have the ability to search for Black owned bookshops or queer owned bookshops or Asian owned bookshops or disabled owned bookshops. And you can narrow it down by all of these choices, women owned bookshops, Native owned bookshops, and really focus your support in a way that is meaningful for you.

Yes, I use it so I know where to send my Libro.fm support and my Bookshop.org support, but also some of them tell you which of these bookshops have physical locations. So I also look at it as a, oh, we haven’t been to this bookshop in our area and it looks like it’s a queer owned bookshop, so let’s go visit here and support them in person.

And so I also use it as not only an online list, but as a little day trip list.

Nicole: Does this mean we get to go visit more bookstores?

Patricia: Always.

Nicole: Yes.

Patricia: I know the last thing we need in here is more books, but uh, maybe we’ll go to another bookstore soon.

Nicole: As I just glanced around and counted, I think I’m counting ten separate bookshelves in the living room right now.

Patricia: But also we have our favorite local independent bookshops, too. And so I always just want to support them.

Nicole: So patricia, aside from bookshops, what is going on that is bringing your joy or filling your cup right now?

Patricia: So, I know in past episodes you’ve already mentioned the cool weather, and so the cool weather for me means that it is knee sock season around the house, I have a vast sock collection and archive.

And I like being able to sleep with knee socks on and have my legs all warm. And I also just have a bunch of fun, ridiculous socks. So it means I just get to walk around and like my dinosaur socks, or my rocket ship socks, or my Halloween bat socks. And It’s the simplest little thing, but it just brings me a lot of joy.

How about you? What’s filling your cup right now?

Nicole: This one’s almost a literal filling my cup, but uh, I finally found a tea that I’ve been looking for. A while ago, you bought me a tin of tea from a company, and I fell in love with it, and then they immediately took it off their website. And I’ve been looking for it for probably about a year.

And we finally found it. I think I’m, I’m almost 100 percent positive. This is the exact tea that was just rebranded and repackaged and it is the Cream Earl Grey from Just Tea. I have a cup of tea every morning. I love Earl Grey tea and this one has just brought me so much joy and I’m so excited. I just cracked into it this week and I’ve been So excited every morning to have a cup of it.

Patricia: I’m going to have to try it. So previously we had gotten this tea from a company called Kahawa and they are primarily a coffee company and they are a Bay Area company. They’re Black woman owned. And one of the wonderful things is that they also work with Black women coffee farmers in Africa. And so the tea that we were getting from them, they kind of branched out to tea, and it was also from other farmers in Africa.

So we had bought like five tins of it at once because we liked it so much, and we eventually worked our way through it, and when we went back to the Kahawa site, it was gone.

Nicole: It was very gone.

Patricia: It was gone. And so, yeah, we were searching and searching. We happened to be at a shop that wasn’t even a tea shop, but they happened to have tea.

And you saw it. You identified it on sight.

Nicole: And not the packaging. The tea itself. I recognized the tea leaves in the little window on the package.

Patricia: I’m excited to, uh, have a cup of that. Possibly after we record.

Nicole: I would love to make you a cup of tea.

Patricia: Excellent. That’s our show for today. We’d like to thank our awesome audio editor Jen Zink. You can find her at loopdilou.com and we’ll definitely add a link to that in the show notes.

Nicole: You can find the full show notes and transcript at eedapod.com. That’s E E D A P O D dot com. There you can also find a link to our Patreon, our Bookshop link, the podcast email list, and a link to the ongoing Enthusiastic Encouragement and Dubious Advice newsletter.

You can also find us on Instagram and BlueSky at eedapod, and email us at eedapod@gmail.com.

Patricia: We are nothing if not consistent.

Nicole: We would appreciate it so much if you would subscribe and rate us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts that allow ratings. It really goes far in helping other people find us.

Patricia: We would also appreciate anyone who can subscribe to us on Patreon. Support there is going to help us keep this show going. You can find us at patreon.com/eedapod. In the meantime, we hope you find ways to be kind to yourself, drink some water, have a snack, maybe some cheese, and we’ll be talking to you soon.

Nicole: Can we even have cheese and tea at the same time?