What people don’t always realise, is that when we are having a good day we are working our brain very hard. It’s like asking a sprinter to do a marathon. They might be able to do it, but it would leave them in a bad condition for an extended period afterwards. Possibly even ruin their career. So if anyone thinks it would be reasonable be ask Usain Bolt  to run a marathon, please go ahead. (He’s 6ft 5in and basically a mass of muscle, so good luck with that.) In fact, he has never even run a mile. The Washington post does a pretty good job of explaining why.

Whilst for the time we are in your presence we “appear” to be doing well, that is just a snapshot in time. You don’t know how we struggled to get out of bed, and changed what we were going to say because we couldn’t remember the words we wanted to use. Whilst it  might look like our brain injury is something we deal with only sometimes, it’s not.

This is demonstrated well by the “Spoon theory”. Christine Miserandino devised it whilst trying to explain to her friend  what living with Lupus is like. Her explanation can be related to any chronic illness. She used spoons to represent energy reserves for that day. Her friend was surprised when Christine took spoons away for daily activities which she usually took for granted. Thus it demonstrated how Christine had to always plan her day to try to conserve her spoons. Otherwise she would run out of energy too quickly and her symptoms would become unbearable.