Spoonie or Loony: Not Much of a Choice, Is It?

There are a lot of "spoonie" /"spoony" tweets flying up and down my timeline on Twitter these days. A 'spoonie' is "someone who has a debilitating, painful, chronic condition but doesn't look sick" (see http://tagdef.com/spoonie). The origin, according to tagdef.com, of the term is the aptly-named Christine Miserandino's "The Spoon Theory". Which is, apparently, what I am. It lacks the visceral, humiliating punch of 'benefit scrounger,' and I am about to become one of those again too, after almost a year spent trying to understand why someone, somewhere decided I wasn't disabled (enough). We spoonies have a difficult choice to make every day: pain relief (and feeling like a junkie failure) and sanity or none and feeling on edge and slightly insane, just trying to make it to the end of the day without weeping in public or killing someone. Today I've gone for pain relief, and I feel slightly guilty, but my shoulders aren't hunched above my ears and I can  stand to stand up.