When I was in primary school, our art teacher gave us an assignment to design a T-shirt. I was excited in a very specific, mildly unhinged way. I didn’t want to write anything on it. I wanted to design: shapes, colours, something visual enough to exist without having to explain itself to anyone. In my head, it wasn’t clothing; it was a tiny exhibition that just happened to have sleeves.

That enthusiasm ended the moment the teacher intervened and announced that the t-shirt had to “say something”. I remember being genuinely confused. Didn’t an image already say something? Didn’t colour speak, didn’t form express?

Apparently not.

Words were mandatory. Visual expression alone was considered insufficient, possibly irresponsible. You could add images, yes, but only if they were supervised by a sentence. The visual, on its own, was not trusted to behave.

That was my first existential crisis, sponsored by cotton fabric.

The Ethical Weight of a Blank T-Shirt

Once you realise that whatever you write on a t-shirt will be read by strangers, the task becomes alarmingly serious. What could I possibly say to everyone? If I wrote something personal, why should anyone care? If I wrote something universal, hadn’t it already been said many times before? And if everyone already knew it, why would my chest be the place to remind them?

I thought about it for days. Nothing felt honest. Nothing felt necessary. Then the deadline arrived, panic arrived with it, and I did what any overwhelmed child with limited philosophical resources would do: I wrote I love my cat.

No ideology. No worldview. Just raw emotional outsourcing.

I drew a very questionable cat next to it, and I did it all with a glitter pen. I finished late at night, left it to dry, folded it carefully, and put it in my bag like a fragile truth.

By morning, most of the glitter had fallen off. What remained was no longer a sentence, just a few scattered letters and a strange animal form without a head or tail. Less I love my cat, more archaeological evidence of affection. I explained the situation in class. The shirt had meant something once; it had simply deteriorated overnight.

A Brief Career in Fashion, Architecture, and Panic

Around the same time, in the same art class, we were asked to design a building. Why we were constantly switching between fashion designer and architect remains unclear. Anyway, I created the building and went to sleep proud, only to wake up at three in the morning with the horrifying realisation that I had forgotten the garden.

Gardens mattered. Gardens implied responsibility.

Going outside to collect grass at that hour felt dangerous and emotionally excessive, so instead I woke my father. I whispered, “Dad, dad…” He’s a heavy sleeper. I poked him. He thought my mother was nudging him to roll over because he was snoring. I poked him again, and he half-opened his eyes.

“I forgot the garden,” I whispered. “We need grass.”

So at 3 a.m., the two of us glued random bits of lawn onto cardboard, using cheap glue we found around the house.

In daylight, the result looked less like a landscaped garden and more like a warning about climate change, soil erosion, and despair.

Back to the t-shirt. The assignment was also a competition. The winning design featured a smiley face, and the phrase Don’t worry, be happy. It won first place. I remember staring at it, trying to understand how such a sentence could belong to a person at all. It didn’t require belief or context. It floated comfortably above the body, as if it were the default setting, like a universally approved emotional screensaver.

That was when I realised something that has followed me ever since: every t-shirt is trying to say something, even when it is saying absolutely nothing.

Why I Look Like I’m Mentally Auditing Strangers

To this day, I cannot stop reading what’s written on people’s t-shirts. I read them on the street, on the metro, in cafés. Some are motivational. Some are ironic. Some are aggressively meaningless. Yet all of them insist on being read.

A t-shirt doesn’t whisper. It declares. It turns the body into a moving sentence, a public subtitle no one asked for. Whether the wearer intended it or not, the message enters the space before the person does.

I take these messages far too seriously. So seriously that after a while, I started to look like someone with deeply questionable intentions. My eyes kept drifting toward people’s chests, not out of attraction but responsibility. I wasn’t checking people out. I was trying to complete unfinished sentences. If anyone noticed, I assume I looked like I was mentally grading t-shirts.

And the worst part is that I gain absolutely nothing from this.

Gestalt Theory Explains Why This Is Now My Problem

Gestalt psychology suggests that the human mind has a deep and slightly needy relationship with completion. It prefers wholes over fragments, finished shapes over interrupted ones. When we encounter something incomplete, like a broken circle, a missing line, or an interrupted pattern, our perception automatically tries to close it. This tendency is known as the principle of closure.

We do this constantly and without consent. We finish other people’s sentences. We see faces in electrical sockets. We mentally repair bad graphic design. Closure allows attention to relax. Once a form is completed, the mind receives permission to move on.

In theory, language is supposed to help with this. A sentence opens a thought and then responsibly closes it. Beginning, middle, end. Everyone goes home.

This is where it all began.

Because today, almost every t-shirt insists on saying something. A sentence printed on a t-shirt looks like it wants to be finished, but behaves in a deeply uncooperative way. It appears suddenly, attached to a moving body, and disappears before the thought it initiates can stabilise. There is no time for tone, context, or clarification. The body keeps walking. The sentence does not wait. The loop remains open.

Gestalt expects closure.
The t-shirt refuses to provide it.

So the mind is left hanging, mid-completion, holding a fragment it didn’t ask for.

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When Closure Fails in Public

The last t-shirt I encountered declared: “I don’t care.”

About what, exactly?
And should I?

Instinctively, I looked for more information. I watched the back of the person as he passed, hoping the sentence might continue or at least clarify itself. Instead, I caught my reflection in a shop window and realised I looked like someone studying strangers' backs with questionable intentions.

I wasn’t.
I just wanted context.

There was no one left to consult. The speaker had already dissolved into the crowd. The sentence is detached from its source and relocated. Meaning didn’t land; it migrated. The unfinished thought became portable.

This is why reading t-shirts doesn’t feel informative. It feels unresolved.

Each phrase activates the Gestalt impulse to complete, then withholds the conditions required to do so. The message is not silent; it is incomplete. Not empty, but interrupted.

It doesn’t end.
It just leaves.

That’s also why my glitterless I love my cat shirt still feels different to me. It didn’t escape mid-sentence. It collapsed immediately. The letters fell apart. The image gave up. There was no clean fragment left to chase down the street, no meaning jogging away from me at a quick pace.

It failed early.

And that early failure, strangely, feels easier to live with than a perfectly printed sentence that walks away unfinished.

At least nothing followed me home.

See you next time. Keep thinking,

Asena