difficult to justify

Sometimes when I make my morning coffee, I stop myself reaching for the mug I always use and instead pull one from the back of the cupboard.

It is usually too small, or too loud. An Easter-egg freebie with faded lettering. One has a brown ring of tea at the bottom that no amount of scrubbing has ever quite removed. It isn't a stain anymore. It's part of the design. Evidence that somebody reached for it often enough to leave a mark.

Now it sits behind the larger mugs.

Sometimes I choose it because I feel sorry for it.

An absurd thought. A mug cannot feel neglected. It cannot wonder why it is no longer someone's favourite. It cannot notice itself being pushed further back each year.

Still, I choose it.

I drink my coffee and scroll through my phone. A post makes me laugh because it feels embarrassingly true.

"If I don't achieve my goals:" catastrophe.

"If I achieve my goals:" okay.

The joke lands because it exposes something ugly. Failure feels enormous. Success feels administrative. A box ticked. A brief nod before the target moves again.

Even now, I can feel myself trying to intellectualise a meme that usually features a serious-looking cat. I worry that if I am not clever, insightful, productive, exceptional, then I become difficult to justify. I become something stored rather than used.

A mug in the back of the cupboard.

Good enough to keep. Not important enough to reach for.

There are hopes I have for myself that I rarely tell anyone. Speaking them aloud feels dangerous, as though ambition becomes heavier once it has witnesses. If people know what I want, then I might have to confront the possibility of never becoming it.

What an exhausting way to exist: suspended between fear of failure and fear of trying.

Perhaps that is why I feel sorry for the mugs.

Because some part of me is convinced that worth is something earned repeatedly, not something possessed.

Like a phone charger that only works when angled a certain way.

Not broken enough to throw away.

Just difficult enough to make people reach for another one first.