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Paper short abstract:

Living with chronic pain changes a person's relationship to time. In this paper, I explore how living with chronic pain leads to a life lived 'in the subjunctive', and consider how this led to the development of the concept of 'worth it' pain for the women who took part in my research.

Paper long abstract:

This paper draws from 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork in North East England, focused on the lives of women who live with a diagnosis of a chronic pain. I consider how living with chronically painful conditions necessitates a life lived 'in the subjunctive' (Whyte, 2002). The subjunctive is a future-oriented tense which emphasises the importance of 'chance' in how a person navigates the future. While living with chronic pain, the future is measured against the present, and choices are made about activities based on the potential they have for causing the person pain in the future.

I contemplate why people continue to choose to do activities that might cause pain in the future. This 'chanciness' allows hope to be incorporated deeply into the kinds of decision making logics a person goes through. Through exploring the kinds of relations of care, solidarity and fun experienced through interactions with both the individuals and support groups that took part in my fieldwork, I consider the importance of hope and feelings of community which help to govern how chronically ill people live with many different potential futures in mind. Often, certain choices for activity were described to me as leading to 'worth it' pain - actions that that made a life worth living. Using this idea of 'worth it' pain, I consider what hope looked like for my participants, and how it was made material through the mundane aspects of everyday life with chronic pain.