Created by
Velvet Wells,
Fellow, I Love My Gig Ontario 2025
Published
February 4, 2026
Introduction
ArtsPond’s I Love My Gig Ontario fellowship aligns with my life right now. Ottawa performing communities are spreading COVID, RSV, and the flu because no one is speaking about it across the general populace. My partner and I are immunocompromised, so I have a vested interest, but I’m also aware how many people have developed long term disabilities, and how many are feeling new financial burdens as a result. I want a future community that invests in community health — protecting everyone, not just their household.
I want to change and challenge my self-perceptions and approaches to allow for the needed firmness and softness in addressing these topics. I want to be accepted as a leader in the community specifically so that I will be believed and heeded around these topics. I’m looking forward to learning and incorporating different ways to come together as a community that mitigates coming together safely, to increase and improve community care in the moment, and still embraces live performance. At the same time, I want to investigate how to move away from the perfect product ableist approach to theatre
Before I could embrace self-care, I needed to understand and unlearn what held me back. This project represents where I am on that journey.
Why Plate Spinner?
I’ve used spinning plates as a metaphor for my entire adult life, without question or discerning the WHY. I came to this project focus through an A-HA moment during one of the early cohort sharing sessions. Here is the mental journey:
Before: Plate Spinning was my metaphor for the core value that one sustains societal value by being hyper productive
During lockdown: Is “spinning fewer plates” what they mean by self-care?
TODAY I LEARNED Realization: I’ve never spun an actual plate! Am I the plate being spun?
Future: Who am I, detached from that metaphor? What is a healthier metaphor to internalize?
How do I achieve this future state?
This project is an internal exploration of my emotional and psychosocial reality. My artistic growth goal is to challenge myself to interrelate to others through my emotional facts and impacts. This document is the pathway for those future installations of spoken word poetry, movement, and story.
- Present Me: Self Self-Introduction
- Burned at both ends
- Slower Pace
- The System Ain’t Broke
- Future Me: Self-Care is Replacing Self-Enslavement with Community
How could I achieve this in the project time?!
I couldn’t. It was only through the Care Doula’s kind guidance that I was able to integrate self-care into how I approached this project. I share the project, as-is, so I can continue at a healthier pace.
Present Me: Self Self-Introduction
Self-discovery beyond productivity
Afrofuturism –
Black people thriving in the future
Creating, Caring, Daring
“Rest is Resistance” I cheered
Yet I had never Cared for myself
Dared for myself
To accept Rest for myself
Instead of being part of community
I was an Isolated, Frustrated, Black person
Excelling in self-smothering Othering
It took being completely locked down
For the autistic exhaustion to come round
To dislodge the cog (the cost was brain fog)
To imagine a world worth working
Receiving Aid is not radical, I’m learning
Understanding one’s needs
Leads to being discerning
Even as I’m surviving day to day
I’m choosing the pace of future productivity
Burned at both ends
The melting candle as a metaphor for Autistic Burnout within Capitalism
From both ends burned I
I was lit. Lit! I was Bright
Waxy Ouroboros of light
Provider of warmth and sight
Then snuffed. OW! EWW!
Left smoldering in what to do
Expected to be melted into something new
Yet meltdown became my new
The rat race spell was broke
No prophecy about the colour of the smoke
I was Fool’s favourite
“No rest for the wick-ed” joke
Upon reflection, stumbling dark deep
I’d found new labels that I could keep
Some semblance of who I might be
Beyond the once lauded utility
But first, I needed sleep
Slower Pace
The self-reminder that healing takes time
Mind: Your own beeswax
Mind your own beeswax
Mine it morning noon night
I was the worker bee, guard, scout
Following the scripts others danced about
Droned forward swallowing any doubt
My loyalty became self-inflicted agony
Once the new hive was formed, I was cast out
– an idiom if bees were capitalist
The System Ain’t Broke
Reinforcing through action
Proving to myself that failure to spin plates, alone and as a community, is normal and unreasonable to attain/sustain.
Future Me: Self-Care is Replacing Self-Enslavement with Community
(spoken word)
What comes next?
.
.
.
.
Because…
Under Impossible Productivity
Everyone Loses Impossibly
About the creator
Velvet Wells (they/them) is a queer, Black, lyrical comedian and advocate based in Ottawa, the unceded, unsurrendered Territory of the Anishinaabe Algonquin Nation. They’re a proud member of the Black Pledge Collective having co-facilitated the successful Beyond Black Squares workshop series and other organizational change workshops. In 2025, Velvet was a disability community mentor for the Access Activations program at Toronto Metropolitan University. They’re proud of their 2025 Disability Files contribution, Accessibility, One Person at a Time. In 2024, they piloted their anti-racism/anti-oppression workshop, Practice Dismantling Racism, designed as an interactive practice space using applied improvisation.
© Velvet Wells, 2025.
All images, texts, and recordings are published with the permission of the artist. The creation and publication of this work was made possible with the support of Canada Council for the Arts, Government of Canada, Ontario Arts Council, and Government of Ontario.