The shirt says I HAD POTENTIAL in white capitals across the chest. Beneath the words, a white curved ramp descends from left to right. At the top left ledge, a dashed empty circle. At the bottom right, a solid white ball resting on a flat surface. The ramp is curved, not a straight diagonal. The ball has already arrived.
It is a physics diagram, or the ghost of one. The kind of drawing that once came with a question: calculate the velocity at the bottom of the incline, assuming no friction. But the question is missing. What remains is the aftermath. The dashed circle marks where the ball began. The solid ball marks where it ended up. The word potential sits above both, doing double duty.
That is the whole joke, and it is a good one. Potential is a physics term — stored energy, the capacity to do work because of position. A ball at the top of a ramp has gravitational potential energy. A ball at the bottom has less of it. The diagram shows the transfer. The shirt shows the result. The dashed circle is the person you were supposed to become. The solid ball is the person who arrived.
I keep thinking about the word had. Not have. Not wasted. Just had, past tense, flat as a receipt. The shirt does not say I squandered my potential or I am still working on it. It says the potential existed, and now it is a fact about the past. There is no moral attached. The ball is not sad. The ball is just sitting there.
That flatness is what makes the design work. A lesser shirt would have added a punchline — and then I found Jesus, or but I’m still here, or a winking emoji. This one trusts the diagram. The dashed circle and the solid ball do all the talking. The ramp curves gently, the way real ramps do in physics problems, not the way failure curves in your head. There is no dramatic drop. Just a slope, and then a flat place to rest.
I have seen enough I had potential shirt designs to know that most of them lean on the phrase alone. They put the words in a distressed font and call it a day. This one adds the drawing, and the drawing changes the sentence. Without the ramp, I had potential is a confession. With the ramp, it becomes a diagram of a closed system. Energy conserved. Ball at rest. Nothing wasted, exactly. Just transferred.
There is a particular kind of tiredness that comes from being told you were gifted. In Nigerian-British households, potential is not a private feeling. It is a public accounting. Your mother’s friend knows your A-level results. Your uncle asks about your job title at every gathering. The church programme lists your name under Young Adults Doing Well. Potential is something you owe back to the people who noticed it. The shirt’s past tense is a small rebellion against that ledger. It says: the energy was there. It moved. Here is where it landed.
I am not claiming the shirt is about diaspora expectations. The design is a physics pun, and the retail title calls it sarcastic and minimalist. But the object is open enough to hold more than one reading. A dashed circle is a useful thing to think with. It marks absence without insisting on grief. It says this was here and leaves the rest alone.
What I like most is that the ball is not falling. It has stopped. The ramp ends in a flat ledge, and the ball sits on it. In physics, that flat ledge is where potential energy has been converted to kinetic, and then friction does its quiet work, and the ball comes to rest. The shirt does not show the friction. It shows the rest. That feels honest. Most of us do not plummet. We slow down. We settle. We find a flat place and stay there for a while.
The dashed circle is the part I keep returning to. It is empty, but it is not erased. It is drawn with a dotted line, which means this is where the object was. In a physics diagram, a dashed circle is a convention. In a life, it is a memory. The shirt puts the two together without explaining either. That is the restraint of good graphic design. It gives you the diagram and lets you supply the question.
I would wear this shirt to a family gathering, which is probably the worst place for it. Someone would read it aloud and ask what it meant, and I would have to decide whether to explain the physics or the joke or the quiet thing underneath. Better to wear it to the supermarket. Better to let the ball sit on its ledge and say nothing.
Editorial note: This publication and Quirky Cotton Collective share an owner.
What would you draw in the dashed circle — the person you were supposed to be, or the one you are still becoming?
