Why I Started Self-Care Shirts

On April Fools' Day 2025, I logged into work at 6am.

A few minutes earlier, an email had arrived. My role was being eliminated. My entire branch. My entire department. Effective immediately, I was on admin leave. I was no longer needed.

I watched it happen like a bad episode of The Apprentice — except it was real, and it was my life, and it was April Fools' Day, which felt like the cruelest joke the universe could have written.

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What I Lost That Day

I want to be honest about what that email took, because it wasn't just a job.

I had spent five years at the CDC as a Senior Graphic Designer. I did full campaigns. I did ads that ran in Times Square. I worked on Super Bowl programs. I helped disseminate health communication for COVID, for mpox, for dengue, for antibiotic resistance, for cancer survivors — for tens of thousands of people who needed that information to make decisions about their health and their lives.

Public health has always been the reason I design. Not because it's glamorous — it isn't. But because graphic design is the medium through which scientists get to talk to people. Someone has all the research, all the data, all the information that could change someone's life — and a designer is the one who figures out how to make it land. That was my work. That was my purpose.

And then, overnight, it was gone. Not just the income. Not just the health insurance. The purpose. The safety. The identity I had built around doing something that mattered.

I was not okay.

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What I Already Had

Here's what I didn't say in that moment: I had been drawing since 2021.

For four years I had been making art for myself — phrases I needed to hear, designs that pushed back against the voices in my head that had been put there by people who were supposed to love me. I printed them on shirts and wore them. Not for anyone else. Just for me.

Make Your Therapist Proud. Be Kind to Your Mind. Not Broken. It's Okay to Not Be Okay. This Is Just a Chapter, Not Your Whole Story.

I had been wearing what I couldn't say out loud for four years before I ever thought to share it with anyone.

My therapist — Dr. Scott, who has been with me through all of it — said: do something with your art.

I had dabbled on Etsy before. A few sales here and there. Just putting it out there to see. But April 2025 was different. April 2025 was a pivot moment, and I've never been someone who sits around and waits.

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How Self-Care Shirts Was Built

I took a few days to fall apart. I cried. I grieved.

And then I bought a domain name.

I set up a Shopify store. I found my print vendor. I uploaded four years of artwork. I built the site — imperfect, real, mine — and on May 1st, 2025, Mental Health Awareness Month, Self-Care Shirts went live.

My first sale came from a former co-worker at the marketing office at FSU — someone I used to work with years ago who saw the announcement and believed in what I was doing before I had any proof it would work.

One sale. The whole first month.

I kept going anyway.

The second month I got three. Then five. I made a lot of mistakes with ads that summer and spent more than I should have learning. I kept investing what I had because I knew — I genuinely knew — that the message mattered. That there were people out there who needed to wear what they couldn't say, the same way I had needed to.

By November 2025 something shifted. The store started getting traction. Reviews started coming in. I redesigned the site. I launched my first big sale. And I donated my first quarterly proceeds to 988 and The Trevor Project — ten percent of everything, the way I'd promised from the beginning. I didn't have much to donate yet. But I donated it.

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One Year Later

This blog goes live in May 2026. One year after launch.

In one year, Self-Care Shirts has crossed 1,000 orders. It has been profitable every month since November 2025. It has donated to 988 and The Trevor Project every quarter — and each quarter, a little more than the last.

But the number that matters most to me isn't any of those.

It's the emails. The reviews. The messages.

My therapist laughed. (That one never gets old.)

I wore this to therapy and someone in the waiting room started crying because they needed to see it.

I got this for my daughter and she called me and cried.

I felt less alone.

That last one. That one is why Self-Care Shirts exists.

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Why, Really

Suffering happens in isolation. It thrives in silence. The more we keep quiet about what we're carrying — the more we perform okay when we are not okay, the more we smile through things that are breaking us — the more alone we all feel, separately, in the same pain.

Self-Care Shirts exists to interrupt that.

Not with platitudes. Not with toxic positivity. With real phrases — funny, painful, honest, human — that give people permission to say the thing they've been holding. To wear it on their body and let the world see it. To have a stranger across a room point at their shirt and laugh, or cry, or say me too — and feel, for a moment, less alone.

I didn't start this brand because I had it figured out. I started it because I was lost and scared and a graphic designer who had spent her whole career using design to help people — and I needed somewhere to put that, and I had four years of artwork that had already saved me, and maybe it could save someone else too.

Public health has always been my reason. It just looks different now.

Self-care shirts instead of CDC billboards. Mental health messaging instead of dengue prevention. A 988 shirt on a stranger's chest instead of a poster in a waiting room.

Same reason. Different medium.

And I cannot wait to see what year two looks like.

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Thank you. For every order, every review, every share, every time you tagged a friend who needed it, every time you bought a shirt for someone going through it, every time you just liked a post at 11pm because something resonated.

You made this real. You kept me going.

The world is a better place with you in it. 🤍

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Self-Care Shirts donates a portion of every order to 988 and The Trevor Project. Every design is hand-drawn by Alyssa Ostroff — a graphic designer, mental health advocate, and trauma survivor who started this brand because she needed these words herself.

Shop the collection →

If you're struggling, call or text 988. Anytime. You are not alone.

If you're just finding Self-Care Shirts for the first time, our Gifts for Therapy-Goers collection is a good place to start. Or if you're shopping for someone specific — a therapist, a grad, someone in recovery, or someone who just needs to hear they're enough — our full gift collections have something for every kind of healing. The You Are Enough Hoodie is always a good place to land.