The Brain FogI saw a post yesterday at a disability blog called
The Broken of Britain, which brings together disabled people to fight the UK government's cuts to public services, particularly those affecting disabled people. The post was about identifying with the terms "brain fog" and "spoons", and it was written by a woman with EB (epidermolysis bullosa); her usual disability blog is
here. I thought this was a misappropriation of both terms.
SE Smith wrote an article a few weeks ago in which she described this as an example of
"cuteifying disability", but there is also the matter of the terms being simply misused. They came out of communities of sufferers of debilitating neurological and auto-immune illnesses. Brain fog is particularly prevalent in the ME world and there is an online community called Foggy Friends, but the term is almost ubiquitous and used by those with varying levels of severity. Emily Collingridge, who wrote
a book about living with severe ME that was published last year, described it as when one's thinking powers feel trapped in a dense fog, and that any mental activity is extremely taxing.
"Spoons" was coined by Christine Miserandino, who has lupus, and was explained very precisely in "The Spoon Theory" as being able to do only so much in a day before you crash, and I'm not sure what that means for someone with lupus but for someone with ME, the crash can be very severe and leave them bedridden, in some cases permanently. It's not a convenient term for fatigue, even when experienced by someone with a disability. Perhaps if someone has depression alongside their disability that would justify it, but it does seem that people are appropriating terms which belong to one section of the disability community to mean other than what they were coined to mean.
(BTW, I have several friends with ME and a few with other disabilities, but I'm not physically disabled myself.)