Sustainability is often presented as a matter of consistency: steady output, predictable routines, optimised systems, and a body that behaves on command. Many frameworks assume a baseline of reliable capacity — physical, cognitive, financial — as if sustainability is simply a matter of planning well enough.
But for many artists and makers, especially those living with fluctuating conditions such as Functional Neurological Disorder (FND), capacity is not a stable resource. It shifts. It contracts without warning. It expands in brief, bright windows. It pauses, interrupts, or re-routes the day entirely.
And this is where a different understanding of sustainability begins to emerge.
The Myth of the Consistent Body
Traditional sustainability models imagine a body that can be disciplined into regularity. They rarely account for tremor, fatigue, dissociation, sensory overwhelm, or the sudden need to lie down mid‑task. They don’t consider the cognitive fog that makes decision‑making slow, or the physical unpredictability that turns a simple action into a negotiation.
Yet these fluctuations are not failures of discipline. They are part of the ecology of being a body.
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