I like the story of how the spoons thing started.
I like how it relates a common broad experience of limitations that is recognised and shared in circles of people with non-ME/CFS conditions. I love being able to share something with people who have other life limiting conditions which are more universally accepted/understood.
It's the history and culture of it that makes it special, not the analogy itself.
Yes, the debt vs credit model with compounding interest does seem more apt for us. ...except it needs an element of high risk investment: losses due to no fault of your own, just pure volatility of the fund.
But to be honest, I don't find that explaining does me any good at all. Be present, smile, ignore all the BS and focus on the reason you're there at all ...and when you can't be there, just don't - with as few words or explanations (to those who don't live it themselves) as humanly possible - is my approach at the moment. I don't know that I'm right but life, and social time, is too short to waste on explanations (to those who won't already understand).
With those I live with I simply tell them there are good days, crash days, bad days and recovery days.
Good days I need to avoid overextending and causing a crash so we can have more of them, bad days you just have to give me some slack, crash days I won't be able to communicate so give me space and quiet without questions, and recovery days I just need to be a bit more careful in order to get back to good days. Then I can tell them: "bad day" and they know. Enough to co-exist anyway.
I find the words: "overdoing it" seem to get the practical aspects across better than anything else. They don't understand the scale of things but they do get some idea.
[personal note from today: Sucks to have people see me on a carefully constructed good day and, assuming I'm doing well, invite themselves over the next day. I tell them maybe text first to see, not wanting to say 'no chance in hell, I'll be crashed tomorrow!', and they are hurt and offended that I 'shut them down' :/
but then I remember that the best people just take it at face value, text, accept a 'bad day sorry' and call by another time.
It's a long road teaching myself not to be driven by other people's expectations. But only I (and other patients like me) know what it's like.
I don't understand every form of cancer and they don't have to understand what's wrong with me. I certainly don't. We just need to live the life we have and know that genuine suffering is legitimate no matter what form it takes. We simply trust and have what empathy we can muster. The less I explain the better the chance they find something to empathise with in their own imagination.]