Matt Kendrick
Writer | Editor | Teacher
The Cutlery Drawer
​
I remember getting my first cutlery set, how grown up I felt. I was heading off to university and here was proof of being an adult. I was fending for myself. Owning cutlery felt like I’d conquered the first step of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. That was how I saw cutlery back then. It was something functional, something concrete. It was a collection of tools I used to cut and prod and scoop, and then (because I was a student and this is how students live) it was left by the side of the sink waiting for several days for someone to wash it up.
My second cutlery set was a present for my twenty-eighth birthday. My student set (which I think had cost less than two pounds) was starting to look a little worse for wear, and since I was now a person with a job and a flat and some semblance of a social life, I felt I’d progressed quite firmly up the pyramid of needs, so I deserved a better cutlery set. It wasn’t anything fancy. But still, it felt like it represented something akin to self-esteem, the second highest step.
Then, three years later, I got set three. I was thirty-one at that point. It was two days after Christmas and the gift of the cutlery set was preceded by a bout of gastroenteritis. I remember thinking about the gastroenteritis how it was the worst Christmas present ever. But believe you me, the third cutlery set was much worse.
I wasn’t really aware of it back then. Or more precisely, I was aware of it, but I believed that what it represented would soon pass. I was in pain because of the gastroenteritis, and gastroenteritis was a thing that cleared up in a couple of days. I was exhausted because I hadn’t slept. In a week at most, I’d be back to normal. But then it was a fortnight, a month, a season, a year. The third cutlery set became part of my life. I wanted to send it back—faulty goods!—of course, I wanted to send it back; but now it’s been almost a decade, and I still haven’t figured out if there’s a returns policy or how that policy might work.
What I have figured out, though, is how the cutlery set works. That might seem strange. Cutlery is cutlery. But this cutlery is special cutlery. And by ‘special’, I mean ‘highly annoying, debilitating, ridiculous, life-affecting’ cutlery. That’s because this third cutlery set isn’t a physical cutlery set; rather it’s an analogy which helps me navigate my chronic illness. And this, for me at least, is how it works:
Spoons
Spoons are a concept of energy. An able-bodied person has a lot of spoons. Their spoons are tablespoons and they start their day with so many spoons they very rarely run out. Someone like me, on the other hand, often deals in teaspoons. Maybe I start the day with ten. Ten’s quite a lot, right? Who needs ten teaspoons to get through the day? Except that tasks an able-bodied person might not bat an eyelid over consume a whole teaspoon or maybe two. Having a shower. Eating breakfast. Walking to the (very) local shop. Having a conversation. Writing an email. Trying to make an appointment. It’s eleven o’clock and I’m already running out of spoons.
Knives
Other people have different analogies for knives but I think of them as measuring pain. How many knives are currently slicing open my body? Where are those knives today? Everyone—able-bodied or disabled—deals with knives, but the amount of knives varies considerably, and unlike spoons, I seem to have an abundance of these. I have paring knives, bread knives, serrated knives, all sorts of different stabby things that represent different sorts of pain in different places in the body. Another difference from how I might have dealt with pain before is that now rather than asking ‘how can I get rid of this knife / pain?’, I ask myself ‘how can I learn to live with it?’
Whisks
You might think I’ve neglected to cover forks, but I’m coming to those. It’s just that in my experience, whisks were what arrived next. Whisks, for me, are akin to emotional turmoil. Imagine waking up every day feeling nauseous. Imagine having to put up with a body that’s capable of throwing out a new symptom like a baby throws a tantrum. Imagine never not being in pain. That starts to get you down after a while, and over the last nine years, I’ve gone through periods of hopelessness, anxiety, mental overload, depression. Sometimes I’m anxious without knowing what I’m anxious about. Sometimes I burst out crying at the silliest things.
Ice cube makers
These aren’t exactly the first thing you’d expect in a cutlery drawer, but there you are—nothing about this cutlery drawer really makes sense. Why, for example, am I always shivering when it’s twenty-five degrees? Why aren’t the four jumpers, two pairs of trousers and three pairs of socks I’m currently wearing keeping me warm? Why do I suddenly have a temperature drop after eating lunch or going for a walk? My body, I’ve learnt to accept, doesn’t function in a sensical fashion. It gets PEM (post-exertional malaise). Its energy levels drop and its central heating breaks down. Sometimes, the coldness is an allergic reaction. Sometimes, it’s because I’m actually cold.
Cheese graters
The doctors have been doing the hokey-cokey on my illness for several years. They like to diagnose me with something. Then they like to take that diagnosis away again. Cue whisks—see above! But one diagnosis they seem determined to hokey-cokey more than any other is that of Sjögren’s disease. In a nutshell, this is dryness throughout your whole body. How I like to describe it is like someone’s used the fine shredding side of a cheese grater over your skin, your tongue, your eyeballs, the lining of stomach, your intestines, your lungs. And it doesn’t really matter whether it’s caused by Sjögren’s or not. All that matters is it isn’t a lot of fun. Cue more whisks—again, see above!
Potato Mashers
All the other items in my cutlery drawer vary in proportion from day to day. Sometimes, there are lots of spoons (although these days are rare and mostly occur when I’ve eaten something problematic which will later produce ridiculous amounts of knives, graters, thermometers and whisks). Sometimes, there are fewer knives. Sometimes, it’s the coarse shredding side of a cheese grater rather than the fine shredding side. But when it comes to potato mashers, the effect is cumulative. Long-term illness in my experience mashes you up and makes you feel small. I feel like I used to be quite confident, but now, any confidence I might portray is merely a mask. As my illness has progressed, any confidence I might once have had has slowly ebbed away, and I’m no longer confident in my ability to do anything—writing, work, being a good brother, being a good human being. I think this is similar to anyone struggling with a burden—energy goes towards wearing the mask of confidence rather than infusing the confidence itself.
Forks
And so, I come to forks. Again, different people use the analogy of a fork to mean different things, but for me, I think of forks as external stressors. You have a bill to pay, that’s a fork. You have an argument with someone, that’s a fork. The doctor rescinds your diagnosis because they’ve decided that would be a fun way to start their day, that’s a fork. Just like many of the items in my cutlery drawer, able-bodied people are very much dealing with forks as well. Forks aren’t exclusive to people with disabilities, and it isn’t just people with disabilities who’ll be familiar with the concept of discovering a new fork and letting out a loud and exasperated ‘forking hell!’ But I suppose the difference is that it becomes so much harder to deal with a fork when (a) you have no spoons, (b) you’re suffering from an abundance of knives, (c) your emotions are being over whisked, (d) you’re doing your best impression of an ice cube, (e) someone has cheese-gratered your entire body, and (f) your confidence has been mashed into a tiny cube.
That’s where I feel I am as I’m writing this essay. For six years, I’ve been lucky enough to work with hundreds of writers on my #WriteBeyondTheLightbulb courses and workshops. I’ve also built up a successful editing and mentoring business. But due to a whole plethora of reasons (the current state of the world being high among them), this work appears to be drying up (taking my income source along with it), and unlike some of my fellow creative-writing freelancers, applying for a ‘proper’ job isn’t an option. And in line with some ironic law (like Murphy’s law and Parkinson’s law) which should possibly be called the Cutlery law, my body has decided this is the ideal moment to go into a full-on flare.
Some of you might turn around here and say, ‘Well, if you’re so ill, why don’t you put yourself and your body first? Get better, then deal with the issue when you’re in a better place physically and a calmer frame of mind.’ And in an ideal world, maybe that would be possible. But as it is, you can’t simply press pause on a fork just because you live with a disability. Mostly, if you ignore a fork, it has fork babies and fork grandbabies, and that’s the last thing you want. So, you’re left with trying to sort out the fork while also dealing with whisks and knives and ice cube trays, and then the first thing you try doesn’t work and you lose all your spoons and the cheese graters start grating, and you try something else and you feel those whisks and those potato mashers, and before you’re know it you’re in some sort of Sorcerer’s Apprentice scenario where the more you try to get rid of the forks, the more everything multiplies until every second of every day is spoons, knives, whisks, cheese graters, ice cube trays, potato mashers, FORKING HELL!
But—let’s take a breath. While the cutlery drawer of my chronic illness doesn’t allow for pauses to happen in real life, it’s perfectly possible on the page. And it feels like an able-bodied reader might need that moment to catch up. I’ve had nine years to assimilate all of this. If this is your first insight into living with a chronic illness, you’ve had about five minutes, maybe ten. And this brings me neatly to cutlery drawer number four. This is something I’ve become more aware of over the last few weeks during this period of more forks, knives, whisks, and rolling pins than I can shake a stick at. It’s been overwhelming, but I haven’t collapsed. I’ve kept my work ticking along. I’ve managed to run a three-week course, I’ve taught two live workshops, I’ve had eleven mentoring meetings, I’ve edited someone’s novella, I’ve even managed to keep up with my own writing, more or less.
And this is only possible because of cutlery drawer number four. Here, there are also spoons, forks and knives. But instead of being things to worry about, they’re things that help me out. In many ways, they’re just like the utensils of my student days. They aren’t anything fancy (take some deep breaths, think about ways things could be worse, write a positive to-do list, watch the birds, make yourself laugh, remind yourself that this will pass…) but they’re perfectly functional nonetheless.
They also remind me that even though I don’t have the health to properly tick off the second-to-bottom step of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs any more, in most ways, I’m much further up than I’ve ever been. I can even look at that top step where there are things like morality, creativity, spontaneity, problem solving, lack of prejudice, and acceptance of fact, and I realise that this is what the third cutlery drawer has given me. I think I’m better version of myself than I was before Santa put all these forks and knives in my stocking nine years ago. I’m not confident in that fact (see potato mashers above!) but it feels like it might possibly be true.
But one thing I am confident in is that there’s also a fifth cutlery drawer, and that’s all of you. Anyone who’s taken the time to read this essay obviously cares enough to stagger through these words. Or else they’re a fellow sufferer seeking connection. And that makes it so much easier. What is it they say? Give a man a spoon and feed him for a day; give a man a cutlery set of wonderful people and feed him for a lifetime. Or something like that. I’m sure I’ll come up with something better the next time I’m not dealing with cheese graters and vegetable peelers and corkscrews and tin openers and scissors and sieves and whisks and knives and forks. But for now, I’ve run out of spoons.
​
​
Published in October 2026