Bad for Business

Created by
Kamee Abrahamian,
Fellow, I Love My Gig Ontario 2025

Published
February 4, 2026

In Taking Care of Your Self, my dear friend Sundus Abdul Hadi writes:

We were never marginal. We are expansive.

These words have scorched themselves into my spirit. Like a prayer, they’ve guided my recent musings. Through ArtsPond’s I Love My Gig Ontario fellowship, I was able to carve out space and time to crystallize my reflections, struggles, and longings around care and community-rooted creative practice. I distilled my burning questions and responded to them through a blend of personal essay and poetry, interwoven with 35mm photography taken on my father’s old Ricoh camera during time spent living and visiting my homeland.

I grew up in an immigrant community in Toronto called Scarborough, but I now live in a place that is not only far from culturally diverse, but also heavily reliant on a tourism economy—one that feels increasingly precarious for those who depend on it to survive. In places like this, politicized art is rarely practiced, let alone celebrated. When it does appear in public, it’s often seen as disruptive—bad for business.

As a politicized artist and storyteller, I’m often on the edge of burnout. That pressure is compounded by the struggle to build a creative community of care in a place where I don’t always feel I belong. Part of that is the diasporic dysphoria I’ve carried all my life. But part of it is the conditions of the place I live in now. I am, in many ways, bad for business. And/but I refuse to accept that this is fixed, final, or unchangeable.

I set an intention: to engage with the many communities I belong to—including the one I live in—in ways that are care-centered and life-affirming. In service to those around me, and those I have always and will always be in service to. Through these reflections, I began to trace a path forward—a vision of what could be, if it were aligned with my values, commitments, and needs.

What follows is just one piece of that work—a poem, yes, but also a potent invocation of where I’ve landed, and what I’m holding close.

To live and make politicized art,
we need the courage to speak truth in places that reward silence.
We need to know where we come from.
We need to carry our stories even when no one is listening.
We need to show up as whole, unruly selves – especially in spaces that weren’t made for us.
Especially when they call our truth “bad for business.”

To allow joy and sustainability into the process,
we need softness to be a strategy.
We need friends who remind us to eat, to dance, to nap.
We need to unlearn urgency.
We need to remember that pleasure is not a distraction from the work—it is the work.

To move beyond survival into thriving as full humans,
we need care that is not performative.
We need spaces that hold us when we unravel.
We need the right to grieve, to wander, to be witnessed.
We need rituals of return, and sticky relationships that can hold contradiction.
We need to build homes, even in exile.

To balance being the productive artist with being the restful muse,
we need to refuse the binary entirely.
We need to design rhythms, not rules.
We need to know when to work, and when to lie down.
We need to believe that stopping is also creating.

Sometimes, the most radical act is to be still when the world demands performance.

And to center care and rest collectively, in real and tangible ways,
we need to build what doesn’t yet exist.
We need to turn empty houses into sanctuaries.
We need to ask what people need—and then actually listen.
We need to centre mothers, migrants, misfits.
We need to trust that care is not a detour from change—it is the very heart of it.

About the creator