“Tell me a little about yourself” is an innocent request until you try to answer it very properly. Then you seem to need a starting point, a common thread, and proof that every choice so far has led to precisely the person you are today. Your hobbies should fit your work. Your work should fit your character. All of it in three sentences.
Sometimes the most accurate answer is simply that you are here now. Last year one thing interested you, this year another, and part of the plan is still open. “Presence doesn’t need a storyline.” Being here does not require a plot.
Not every day is a chapter
Stories have a lovely ability to make events understandable. A beginning, a turn, something learned. Inside a life, those boundaries are not always easy to find. Some interests arrive by chance. Some are left unfinished. Very little might happen on a Tuesday, and it does not later have to become a necessary stage before a great transformation.
You can get to know a person without first producing a coherent explanation of their life so far. You find out what makes them laugh now, what interests them, or why they are reading that particular book. Small things are quite enough for a conversation. Everything need not lock into one picture at once.
That is one way to read this sentence. You can be here even while your own summary is being edited. The absence of an introduction does not mean the person is missing.
The words take their place
The design begins with the large word “PRESENCE”. Below it come “DOESN’T”, “NEED A” and “STORYLINE.” Four tightly set lines, a shared left edge, a full stop on the last line. Beside the letters there is no portrait, symbol or visual biography to explain the sentence on the wearer’s behalf.
The line lengths vary. The short “NEED A” leaves more space on the right; the long “STORYLINE” reaches out again. It is a simple block of text, but it does not stand as a perfectly uniform rectangle. The words have kept their own lengths.
There is a small joke in it too: a sentence that releases you from telling a story is itself very visible on your chest. It does not hide the wearer. It simply does not supply all the answers about them. Wearing the thought does not require a detailed explanation either.
Between explaining and being here
Not Here To Explain sounds like a clear boundary: the explaining can stop here. “Presence Doesn’t Need a Storyline” leaves the door a little more open. You can talk. You can love your own story. It does not have to be an admission ticket to every situation.
Presence Is Louder Than Noise also looked at being present without constantly speaking up. Here the attention falls on a different demand: the need to keep turning yourself into an understandable whole. Sometimes it is much freer to say that not everything is connected yet.
If that sounds familiar, the words on the shirt might be a friendly note to yourself. Especially on a day when an interest or a choice does not fit the previous version of you particularly well. You do not immediately have to present a new version of yourself because of it.
You are already here. The introduction can be written later, if it turns out to be needed at all.
Anti
(the guy who makes these shirts)
Blacksunset.ee
References and links:
