On a Tuesday in October, I found myself staring at a shirt that says LET’S ROOT FOR EACH OTHER AND WATCH EACH OTHER GROW. The words wrap around four smiling root vegetables—a carrot, a radish, a beet, and an onion—their roots visible in soil. They look like they’re at a party I wasn’t invited to. The carrot is beaming. The radish has a kind of smug, rounded confidence. The beet is just happy to be there. The onion, as onions do, seems to be holding back tears.
I want to be the kind of person who wears this shirt. I want to be the kind of person who roots for other people without a flicker of resentment, who watches them grow and feels nothing but warmth. But I am not that person. I am the person who, upon seeing a friend’s promotion announcement, feels a brief, sharp pinch before the genuine happiness arrives. The pinch is the truth. The happiness is the performance. And this shirt, with its cheerful root vegetables, is asking me to perform.
Let’s call the promise what it is: the promise of mutual growth as a social identity. The shirt is from Quirky Cotton Collective, and you can find it here. It’s a gardening pun, sure. But it’s also a thesis statement about how to be a good friend, a good colleague, a good person. It says: we are all in this together. We are all rooting for each other. We are all watching each other grow.
But here’s the thing about watching things grow: it takes a long time, and most of it is boring. The carrot doesn’t sprout overnight. The beet doesn’t double in size because you cheered. Growth is mostly waiting, and waiting is mostly silence. The shirt doesn’t mention the silence. It doesn’t mention the weeks when nothing happens, when you’re just sitting in the dirt, wondering if you’ve been forgotten. It doesn’t mention the envy that creeps in when someone else’s soil seems richer than yours.
I’ve been thinking about this shirt as a kind of contract. When you wear it, you’re signing up to be the person who roots for others. You’re agreeing to celebrate their wins, to water their gardens, to clap when they bloom. But what happens when you’re the one who needs rooting for? What happens when you’re the onion, holding back tears, and everyone else is a carrot with a perfect smile? The shirt doesn’t say. The shirt just says LET’S ROOT FOR EACH OTHER. It doesn’t say AND ALSO LET’S ADMIT THAT SOMETIMES WE’RE JEALOUS. It doesn’t say AND ALSO LET’S MAKE ROOM FOR THE DAYS WHEN WE CAN’T ROOT FOR ANYONE BUT OURSELVES.
I don’t think the shirt is wrong. I think it’s incomplete. It’s a greeting card, not a memoir. It’s the version of friendship we post on Instagram, not the version we live at 11 p.m. when we’re scrolling through someone else’s success and feeling small. The root vegetables are smiling because they don’t have to deal with any of this. They’re just drawings. They don’t have to watch their friends get promoted while they’re still stuck in the same job. They don’t have to root for someone who forgot to root for them back.
But maybe that’s the point. Maybe the shirt is aspirational. Maybe it’s not a description of how things are, but a hope for how they could be. Maybe wearing it is a way of saying: I’m trying. I’m trying to be the kind of person who roots for others, even when it’s hard. Even when I’m the one who needs rooting for. Even when the onion is crying.
I don’t know if I’ll ever be that person. I don’t know if anyone is. But I do know that the shirt exists, and that someone designed it, and that someone else will wear it, and that somewhere, a carrot and a radish and a beet and an onion will smile up from a cotton blend and remind us that we’re all just trying to grow. And maybe that’s enough. Maybe the shirt doesn’t need to be a memoir. Maybe it just needs to be a reminder. A small, cheerful, slightly smug reminder that we’re not alone in the soil.
Or maybe it’s just a shirt. Maybe I’m overthinking it. Maybe the root vegetables are just root vegetables, and the words are just words, and the whole thing is just a nice gift for a gardener. But I don’t think so. I think the shirt is asking something of us. I think it’s asking us to be better than we are. And I think that’s a lot to ask of a t-shirt.
Editor’s note: This publication and Quirky Cotton Collective share an owner.