Exercising an individualized process of agency in restoring a self and repairing a daily life disrupted by fibromyalgia: A narrative analysis

Abstract

Objective: Fibromyalgia is a chronic condition that has major impact on people’s lives. This study examines individuals’ illness trajectories, with a particular focus on daily life experiences and self-managing.

Methods: Narrative interviews were conducted, asking participants to story their daily life experiences from illness onset to the present, and to reflect on the future. Embedded in their storying were experiences of recently being diagnosed, navigating daily life in the face of illness, and participating in a self-management intervention. The data underwent a narrative analysis.

Results: In keeping with the idiographic focus of narrative research, two individuals’ stories were chosen to portray an individualized process of self-managing illness in daily life. The storylines ‘Resuming prior self and life’ and ‘Taking life and self in new direction’ illuminate how individuals with differing illness trajectories and life situations autonomously apply resources available to them in their lives. They make sense of illness by bringing together their own lifeworld experiences of stress and factual knowledge and, through a process of individual agency, discover and try out what is right to do in their own life in the face of chronic illness.

Conclusions: These two storylines illustrate that a self-managing process is an individual process nested in the person’s social context. Self-management encompasses an individualized process of agency in remaking daily life and reconstructing a sense of self.