I AM TRYING
I AM TRYING.
The Concept.
Who among us hasn’t felt some mix of helplessness, frustration, confusion, and struggle at the state of the world? Being emotionally overwhelmed is surprisingly easy when we look around us and find that the magnitude of the world’s problems, and indeed, even our own problems in our own lives, are often just too much for any one of us to overcome on our own. And yet, reaching out for help has somehow never been harder. The Information Age means that we know more about one another and one another’s struggles than ever before, and our fears around the ways others might judge us are correspondingly worse than ever.
The Response.
Even though the world seems to have an ever-decreasing tolerance for growth by being human (read: trial and error, mostly), we still believe that therapeutic work shows that daring greatly and healthy risk-taking are core components of any real change process — we don’t know what we or others are capable of until someone takes a risk, tries something new, and then musters the courage and responsibility to adjust course and make corrections based on what we learned. And then to do it all over again because that’s how change happens. So, we believe that it is mission critical for our culture to acknowledge the ways that human kind is desperately trying to change, to grow, and to evolve. This optimistic and accurate view of humanity gives us the courage to forgive others and ourselves for our failures to be superhuman and know how to live life any better than we do. And that in turn gives us the ability to recognize incremental change and give others and ourselves a break. And to remember — we are in this TOGETHER.
The T-Shirt.
The I AM TRYING tees are an expression of the heart in a time where we must return to the center of our intention and spirit, muster all the strength at our disposal, and screw our courage to the sticking place. We announce to the world that perhaps all is not well, but that we intend to keep going, to keep placing one foot in front of the other, and to keep looking at the world and ourselves with eyes that affirm human dignity and core worth.
The T-Shirts read: