Editorial note: This publication and Quirky Cotton Collective share an owner. This is not an independent review.
On a white shirt, in white capitals, the words I HAD POTENTIAL sit above a curved ramp that descends from left to right. At the upper left ledge, a dashed empty circle hovers. At the lower right, a solid white ball rests on a flat ledge. The ramp is curved, not a straight diagonal. That is the entire graphic: text, a dashed outline, a solid sphere, and a slope that bends.
I keep looking at the dashed circle. It is the only thing in the drawing that isn’t there. The ball is solid, the ramp is solid, the ledges are solid. The circle is an outline of a shape that has already left. In physics, a dashed circle on a diagram usually marks a starting position or a predicted location—a place where a body was or should be. Here it marks the top of the ramp, the high point, the moment before descent. The ball is at the bottom. The dashed circle is the ghost of where it began.
That is the joke, and it is also the argument. The shirt does not say I have potential. It says I had it. Past tense. The ball has already rolled. The dashed circle is not a promise; it is a chalk outline of a former self.
What makes the design work—and what makes it worth reading rather than just wearing—is that the physics is not decorative. A ball on a curved ramp is a classic potential-energy diagram. Height equals potential energy. The higher the ball, the more potential it has. The dashed circle at the top marks maximum potential. The solid ball at the bottom marks minimum potential. The curve is the path between them. The shirt is a graph of a loss.
But here is the turn: the ball is still on the ledge. It has not rolled off the edge. It is resting, not falling. The dashed circle is empty, but the ball is solid. The potential is gone, but the object remains. That is a more interesting statement than simple self-deprecation. It is not I failed. It is I am still here, at the bottom of the curve, and the shape of where I started is still visible above me.
I have written before about the paperwork of family building—the consent forms, the sperm-bank catalogs, the insurance EOBs that arrive with a dollar amount where a person should be. Those documents are also potential-energy diagrams. They mark a starting position (the dashed circle of intended parent) and a resting position (the solid ball of patient, client, case number). The ramp between them is curved, not straight, because nothing in this process descends at a constant rate. You do not lose potential evenly. You lose it in phone calls, in waiting-room hours, in the moment a nurse says I’m so sorry and you are already calculating the next cycle’s start date.
The shirt is not about fertility. It is a physics pun, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. But the reason it lands—the reason someone would wear it—is that the diagram is honest about how potential works. It is not a motivational poster. It is a free-body diagram of a self that has already moved.
There is a version of this shirt that would be cruel: I had potential as a punchline about wasted talent, about aging, about the gap between who you meant to be and who you are. That version would put the ball at the bottom and leave it there, no dashed circle, no ramp, just a flat line and a punchline. This design does something else. It keeps the ramp. It keeps the curve. It keeps the dashed circle at the top, which means the shirt is not just about falling. It is about the shape of the fall.
I think about the dashed circle as a kind of document. It is a record of a prior state. In fertility treatment, the paperwork does this constantly: it records your baseline, your antral follicle count, your AMH, your lining thickness, your potential as a number on a form. Then the cycle happens. The number changes. The dashed circle stays on the page, an outline of what the clinic thought you could do. The solid ball is what you actually did.
The shirt does not resolve that gap. It just draws it. That is why I keep coming back to the curve. A straight diagonal would be a different joke—a simple slope, a predictable decline. The curve suggests something more like real life: a slow start, a steep middle, a flattening at the bottom. The ball does not accelerate forever. It reaches the ledge and stops. The potential is gone, but the motion is over. There is a kind of rest in that.
If you are looking for the shirt, it is the I Had Potential Funny Physics Pun Sarcastic Minimalist Quote from Quirky Cotton Collective. The design is white on white, which means it reads as a diagram first and a slogan second. That is the right order. The words are a caption. The drawing is the argument.
I do not know who buys this shirt. I do not know if they are physics teachers, or former gifted kids, or people who have recently received a letter from a clinic that uses the word unfortunately in the first sentence. I only know that the dashed circle is the most honest part of the design. It is the part that says: something was here. It had a shape. It had a height. It had a name. The ball at the bottom is what is left. The shirt does not tell you whether that is a tragedy or a relief. It just shows you the ramp.
That is enough. A diagram does not need to console you. It only needs to be accurate.