Cameronwhitten
Cameronwhitten Personal essays, notes, and ideas worth sharing. Browse Latest Posts This is my corner of the internet. I write about whatever I’m thinking about: books, projects, random ideas, and sometimes my own messy life.…
The Smallest Word on the Shirt Is Doing All the Work
The shirt is almost blank. On a dark ground, centered, in lowercase, sits one word and a period: meh. The lettering is small enough that you have to be close to read it. There is…
The Ball at the Bottom of the Ramp: What the ‘I Had Potential’ Shirt Actually Says
The shirt shows a diagram. White capital letters across the top: I HAD POTENTIAL. Below them, a white curved ramp descends from an upper left ledge to a lower right flat ledge. At the top…
The Shirt That Says Root for Each Other. The Vegetables Are Doing the Work.
The shirt 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, an onion — each one drawn with…
The Meh Shirt Is Not a Punchline. It’s a Boundary.
The shirt is a dark rectangle with four white letters on it. Lowercase. A period at the end. meh. No animal. No slogan stacked underneath. No arrow pointing to the wearer. Just the word, large…
The Warning Label You Wear on Purpose
NOT FRIENDLY. DO NOT TOUCH. The words sit in warning-sign lettering, the kind you’d find on a chemical cabinet or a locked gate. Above them, a yellow caution triangle. Beside them, a hand with a…
The Composition Notebook Shirt Is a Costume You Can Read
The shirt is a rectangle pretending to be a notebook. Black-and-white speckle across the body, a dark binding strip down the left side, and a white ruled label near the top. Inside that label, the…
The Smallest Word on the Shirt Is Doing All the Work
The shirt is dark. In the center of the chest, in lowercase letters, the word meh. sits very small. That is the whole design. No animal. No flag. No slogan stacked under a graphic. Just…
Why Fitness Became My Form of Daily Meditation
Fourteen months after I walked out of Snake River Correctional Institution, a counselor at the Multnomah County Department of Community Justice office on SE Hawthorne suggested meditation. She meant an app. Ten minutes, eyes closed,…
Why I Reread My Own Writing When I Want to Lie
Why I Reread My Own Writing When I Want to Lie The kitchen table in my Gresham apartment has a warped edge where someone before me set a hot pan down without a trivet. I…
The Complicated Grief of Losing Friends to the Streets
Complicated grief has a clinical definition. In 2022, the DSM-5-TR added prolonged grief disorder: grief that stays stuck a year or more after a death, still disabling, still running the show. On the street, and…
How Financial Literacy Became Part of My Personal Freedom
Financial literacy isn’t a personality trait. It’s a set of decisions made under pressure, often with incomplete information. For me, it became a survival skill before it became anything like a philosophy. I learned to…
Why I Stopped Performing Strength and Started Being Honest
Reentry taught me that strength is often a costume. I wore it for years—shoulders back, voice steady, answers ready. The costume said I was fine. The costume said prison didn’t touch me. The costume was…