Working With What I Have: Capacity, Chronic Pain, and a Life Built in Layers

By Hansheng Lee 

A while back I wrote about creating through chronic pain~ honoring the body in the studio. That piece was about the easel, the brush, the specific negotiation between a bad shoulder and a painting that wants to get made. I still stand by every word of it.

But painting is only one piece of what an actual week looks like for me. There's teaching. There's running a collective. There's moderating a community. There's planning, admin, a hundred small decisions nobody sees, and a garden that doesn't pause for any of it. Chronic pain doesn't clock out when I leave the studio~ it comes with me into the spreadsheet, the call, the planning session, the pile of work that isn't art at all. So this is the wider version of that first post. Not what a bad day does to a painting. What it does to an entire working life, built out of several different kinds of work, running at the same time.

I'll say the same thing here I said then. This isn't a how-to. I don't have a fix. What I have is thirty-some years of living in this body and a handful of years of actually working with it instead of against it, and I'd rather hand over what I've actually learned than pretend I have it solved.

🌦️ Redefining What a Working Day Even Looks Like

My pain moves with the weather. Shoulders, hip, ankles~ old ground I already covered, but worth repeating because it's still true every single week. A storm rolling in tells me before the forecast does. There's a particular kind of ache that shows up a day or two before the sky actually does anything, and after enough years of it I've stopped arguing with the accuracy. My body is, unfortunately, a better meteorologist than most apps on my phone.

For a long time I measured a day by how much I got through. A full day meant a full list, crossed off, in order, ideally before anyone else was awake. Chronic pain does not negotiate with that definition. Some days the list survives contact with reality. Some days it doesn't survive the first hour, and I'm left staring at eleven things I was certain about at 9am and cannot touch by 11.

What changed wasn't the pain. It was the measurement~ I stopped asking "did I get through the list" and started asking "did I meet the day I actually got, instead of the day I planned for." That's a smaller question, and a kinder one, and it turns out to be a far more honest one too. A day where I moved three things forward instead of eleven isn't a failed day. It's a day where three real things happened inside a body that had less to give than I wanted it to have. Those aren't the same thing, even though they used to feel identical to me.

🧩 Matching the Work to the Day, Not the Day to the Work

Here's the part that goes beyond the studio. Not all work asks the same thing of the body~ so leverage it~! 

Some of it is physical~ mixing paint, standing at an easel, moving canvases, working in three dimensions, the parts of running a studio that nobody photographs. Some of it is quiet and seated~ admin, planning, the unglamorous back end of running several things at once, the kind of work that looks like nothing from across the room but still costs something. Some of it is social~ a call, a meeting, holding space for a community that's counting on me to show up steady, moderating a conversation that needs a level head more than it needs my hands. And some of it is the kind of flow work that barely feels like effort until an hour later my body sends the bill, the deep-focus stretches where I forget to eat or move and pay for it that evening.

On a good day I can move between all four without much thought, sliding from a painting session into an admin block into a call and back again. On a harder day, the honest question isn't "what needs to happen today," it's "which of these four kinds of work can my body actually do right now." A flared hip can still sit through a planning call. A flared shoulder can still think clearly about a spreadsheet, still moderate a discussion, still make a decision that matters. The work doesn't stop. It just stops assuming the body owes it a particular shape.

A real week, honestly~ looks something like this. Monday the shoulder's fine and I get real studio time in, hours of it, because I know better than to assume that'll still be true Wednesday. Tuesday a storm's coming and I already feel it, so I front-load the physical tasks and push the quiet ones later. Wednesday the storm actually arrives and so does the ache, and the day becomes calls and admin and nothing that requires standing for long. Thursday it's lifted enough that I can paint again, so I do, even though the to-do list from Wednesday is still sitting there half-finished. By Friday the week doesn't look like what I planned Sunday night. It looks like what needed to happen~ happened, which is a different and more honest document entirely.

I used to feel like I was failing when I couldn't do the physical version of a task and had to reach for the quiet version instead. Now I just think of it as choosing which door is actually open today, instead of standing in front of a locked one out of principle. At the end of the week or month~ the tasks that needed to get done, still got accomplished and there is no guilt as to when I got it done. 

🗣️ Saying It Out Loud

The part I had to learn the hard way, and the part that has almost nothing to do with pain management and everything to do with pride: telling people directly, before they find out the harder way.

I used to try to quietly absorb the gap. Push through a call I shouldn't have taken, promise a timeline my body had already vetoed, let people assume steady output because admitting otherwise felt like admitting I couldn't be trusted with what I'd taken on. That was completely backwards, and it took me longer than I'd like to admit to see it. The people actually worth working with, running a studio with, building a community alongside, don't need me to be constant. They need me to be honest about what's true this week, so they can plan around the real thing instead of the fiction I was protecting.

So now I say it. Plainly, and early, not as an apology. "This week's lighter than usual, here's what's actually moving." "I need this pushed a few days, my hip's not cooperating." It costs something to say out loud every time, some old instinct that still wants to prove I can carry anything without setting it down. But the alternative costs way more, and it costs the people around me too, who end up building plans on a foundation I knew wasn't completely solid.

🌡️ What People Get Wrong About Capacity

I also want to say this plainly, because I think it gets missed constantly, in ways that actually shape how people treat chronic pain in a work context. Chronic pain does not automatically mean low capacity, and I'd rather correct that assumption directly than let it sit unspoken~ because I have been living it for decades. 

I have a genuinely high capacity. I can almost always find some way to keep something moving, even through pain that would flatten a lot of people's whole day. That's not a boast, it's just accurate, and it matters because the two things~ pain and capacity~ get treated as the same variable when they aren't. What chronic pain actually changes is the shape capacity takes, not the amount of it. Some days that capacity goes into the studio. Some days it goes into a hard conversation, or a slow crawl through admin, or nothing more than tending the garden and calling that enough, and that redirection is not a smaller version of working. It's just working differently.

This cuts the other way too, and I think it matters just as much as everything else. Because I clearly have capacity, people sometimes assume the pain must not be that bad, or must have been solved, or must only show up occasionally. It hasn't and it doesn't. High capacity and real, frequent, weather-tracked pain live in the same body at the same time, and neither one cancels the other out. I built a whole planning system around this exact distinction, actually~ one that treats capacity as something very real and changing rather than something constant you're failing to hit. That's a longer story for another post. But the short version belongs here too: respecting a season of lower output is not the same thing as being fragile. It's just telling the truth about the body doing the work, in both directions, on the days it gives more and the days it gives less.

⚖️ The Guilt Tax

There's a specific kind of guilt that shows up when the thing you couldn't finish today isn't a painting, it's a business. A community. A person waiting on a reply.

Art has always given me somewhere to put a hard feeling. A canceled meeting doesn't have that same outlet. When a flare means I can't show up the way I wanted to for the collective, or the community, or the people counting on a response, that lands differently than a painting sitting unfinished on the easel a little longer. There's a version of guilt that comes from comparing this week to a better one, and a sharper version that comes from imagining someone else's disappointment before they've actually expressed any.

Most of the time that imagined disappointment isn't real. I've learned that the people who matter would rather have an honest delay than a hollow promise, the same lesson from the section above, just paid for in a different currency. But I won't pretend the guilt fully goes away just because I understand where it comes from. It shows up anyway, and the actual practice isn't eliminating it, it's noticing it, naming it as the old pattern it is, and choosing to act on the truer information instead of the guilt. Alignment~ Some days I do that cleanly. Some days I don't, and I try again the next one.

🫖 The Practical Layer

Some of what actually helps, in no particular order, none of it dramatic:

• Batching on the good days. When my body cooperates, I try to get ahead~ prep more than I need for that single day, so a harder day later has somewhere to draw from instead of starting from zero. This applies to painting the same way it applies to admin. A good Monday can quietly carry a rough Thursday.
• Tea, incense, and a short daily sit. None of it is a productivity trick. It's just what keeps the day from feeling like it's only pain and only tasks. I aim for something like twenty minutes of quiet most days, or at least I try to, and "at least I try to" is doing real work in that sentence.
• Massage as maintenance, not luxury. I treat it the way I'd treat any other recurring appointment that keeps a system running, not as a reward for a hard week but as part of what keeps the weeks from being uniformly hard.
• A walk, even a short one. My dog doesn't care how far we go. Neither, most days, do I. It's rarely about the distance and almost always about getting out of my own head for ten minutes.
• Tracking weather like it's a planning input, because it is. If a storm is coming, I plan the physical work for before it arrives and leave the quiet work for after. I've started treating a weather app the way other people treat a calendar app, which sounds strange until you've lived in a body that actually runs on that schedule.
• Letting projects run at different speeds on purpose. Some things are built to move fast when I have the capacity for it. Others are built to sit for a while and wait, and I've stopped treating the waiting ones as behind. They're just in a slower season, same as anything in a garden.

None of this fixes anything. It's not supposed to. It's just what keeps several bodies of work moving without asking my body to lie about what it can do that day.

🌱 Final Thoughts: Still Building, Just Differently

I work in layers. Everything I build has its own season~ some parts are constantly in summer, always active, and some have a real winter where they go quiet for a while and that's allowed. Chronic pain just means the seasons don't always follow the calendar I'd have picked for them or the calendar of reality. 

The work still gets built. The collective still runs. The community still gets held. And the garden still grows. It happens in a different order than it would on an easier body, and some weeks it happens slower than I'd like. But slower isn't the same as stopped, and a different shape isn't the same as a smaller one. I care about building things that actually last, and nothing about that goal requires me to build it at the pace of a body I don't have.

I'm not writing this for sympathy, and I wasn't looking for it with the first post either. I'm writing it because I know I'm not the only one building something real on a body that doesn't always agree to the plan. If that's you too~ and this resonated, let me know.

You're just working with what you actually have, instead of what you wish you had.
That's not a consolation prize~ most days, it's the only honest way to build anything that's going to last. And I say this as I'm in front of a laptop in the middle of a thunderstorm. 

~Hansheng