Maria moved to asking rhetorical questions, slowing down the pace of narrating from the angry account of how work had gone that day. This brings in the story-theme of fatigue, as defined as a sensation that is more than tiredness and cannot be ‘relieved by rest or sleep’ (Lackner et al., 2013:2). Fatigue is not related to activity and does not
‘correspond to one’s level of exertion’ (ibid.) In addition to being about fatigue as connected with IBS embodiment (Gralnuk et al., 2000; Labus et al., 2007; Lackner et al., 2013), I interpreted Maria’s story to connect to Western cultural scripts of femininities. Maria was not the only person to explore feelings of fatigue and exhaustion, although the
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following story was selected as this is another example of a chaos story that has now become a coherent and articulate account of embodied suffering.
‘I spend so much energy’
Maria (stanzas 1-2, day 3)
3 How come I spend so much time and energy making everyone else happy? I spend hours doing the monthly schedule and make sure everyone else has enough Saturdays off, they get their 1/2 days and how do I do that? I end up working 4 Saturdays in a row, I never take my 1/2 days and I work open to close on Fridays when I make sure no one else has to do that. Maybe if I wasn't so nice I wouldnt feel so taken advanatge of.
4 Great, Imodium just wore off. Its going to be another long night apparently.
The question Maria posed about why she uses ‘so much time and energy’ (stanza 3, day 6) on others’ happiness is a particularly emotive and sad positioning of Maria as a protagonist. Öhman et al. (2003:528) argued that people living with chronic illness explored how they accommodated uncertainties and liminality as part of illness embodiment in their research. This involved a state of being ‘hovering
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between suffering and enduring’, which in Maria’s wrote was part of her work-related stories. IBS further effected her feelings exhaustion and being drained of her ‘energy’, with euphemistic discourses deployed of fatigue as embodied and omnipresent (Shorter, 2008:
3000). Fatigue was an embodiment of illness that enveloped her emotions, feelings and actions throughout the various domains of her everyday life (Kleinman, 1988; Frank, 1995; Bowditch, 2006; Moss and Dyck, 2008; Swoboda, 2008). This was a story told from the perspective of a woman who feels exhausted by her actions of ‘making everyone else happy’ (stanza 3, day 6), at the cost of her own joy and contentment.
‘Maybe if I wasn’t so nice’
Maria asked herself, why she was putting her colleagues’ needs before my own (‘I spend hours doing the monthly schedule and make sure everyone else has enough Saturdays off … how do I do that?’ stanza 3, day 3). I interpreted this as Maria’s exhaustion at her unpaid emotional labour (Hochschild, 1979; Bartky, 1990), which had left her feeling spent and exhausted. Jack (1991) argued this is a way in which women are left with emotional distress when living in Western societies that teach girls and women to put others’ needs before their own, in accordance with Western societal gender norms (Gilligan, 1982; Brown and Gilligan, 1992; Jack and Ali, 2010). Western gender socialisation has been argued by Brown and Gilligan (1982) to encourage the moral development of girls as relational beings, who then go on to listen to
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damaging ‘culturally scripted voices’ (Gilligan, 2010) that encourage women to silence their needs and voices.
Maria could be interpreted as having reflected on how she did this at work, with the work schedules and keeping quiet when disrupted by Annabella’s behaviour, though I make this point with some hesitation.
It would be ethically questionable to impose my analysis as a feminist researcher (see for example, Miller et al., 2012). Yet, in exploring an interpretation of the data I was persistently troubled with the message to Maria’s story that was felt caught up in a pattern of self-silencing.
She did however end the story in a way that challenged this positioning, querying to herself and the audience: ‘Maybe if I wasn't so nice I wouldnt feel so taken advanatge of’ (stanza 3, day 3).
‘Why am I so weak?’
I want to explore another story that I interpreted to be a chaos narrative about an experience of suffering, though this was a story about a one-off event that took place after Alice visited her friend. The diary entry on day 3 of Alice’s diary retained the qualities of being visceral, emotive and about an experience that was difficult. Yet, Alice’s style of storytelling throughout her diary was coherent and clear.
177 Alice (stanza 5, day 3)
Rosamund drops me off at the tram stop. It’s 10:15pm and no one else is on the platform. It feels lonely. Two young men appear wearing tracksuits. I feel nervous.
They stare at me and one comes + stands close, still starry staring.
I have my phone + What’s App Rosamund. She quickly drives back and comes to the platform. By this time the two men have lost interest and moved further up the platform.
It was the first time in a while I have felt scared I was totally alone and vulnerable. They could have mugged me, anything.
I go to a different carriage I think and question myself.
Why did I feel scared? Why am I weak?
This story was told in a way that was evocative and suspenseful, with Alice emplotting herself as feeling disturbed by the two men who loitered near her when she travelling late at night. This story stood out in her diary as Alice moved from writing a cheerful narrative of her evening with Rosamund to the event-based account of finding herself feeling ‘alone’ with no one else’ around’ (stanza 5, day 3). She had
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messaged using the mobile phone messaging application WhatsApp to come to help her as she ‘felt nervous’ (ibid.), although by the time Rosamund arrived, she emplotted the two men as having ‘lost interest’
(ibid.) and left her alone. This was a story about struggling with her feelings of having been a passive and ‘vulnerable’ (ibid.) protagonist, who felt ‘totally alone and vulnerable’ (ibid.) on the eerie platform.
The risk discourse Alice deployed encouraged the audience to see Alice’s fears justified. Alice left untold why she experienced these anxieties, though I interpreted this to be a story about Alice as a woman fearing male violence. She euphemistically deployed discourse that ‘anything’ could have happened, which I took as leaving unsaid her reference to rape or sexual violence. Considering the story in a wider cultural context provides a way to understand the story, though I would far from agree with Alice’s reflections on her ‘weakness’ (‘Why did I feel scared? Why am I weak?’ stanza 5, day 3) for feeling intimidated. I would have liked to be able to reach out to Alice who so harshly judging herself, though as a researcher not a therapist this would not have been appropriate. Furthermore, and even if this was ethically appropriate behaviour, the nature of diary methods prevented me responding to Alice’s distress in reconstructing the events in her diary.
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