Getting dressed as a daily ritual in uncertain times
Since the beginning of the year, I’ve been living inside a fog, felt both inwardly and in the world around me. What began as a yearlong plan was pared down to three months, and then further distilled into a month-to-month recalibration, a way of returning my attention to what I can truly tend and shape.
The state of the world, along with personal shifts, can feel overwhelming. In what Prentis Hemphill names a “collective freeze response,” I find myself split between witnessing the external and turning inward, searching for clarity, answers, and reassurance, even when none are in sight.
In this state of seeking, I look to philosophy and spiritual texts to steady my thinking and guide my practice. It was there that I encountered Marcus Aurelius and his Meditations*.
As I explored his musings, I found myself returning to one idea again and again: power as the mastery of response rather than the domination of circumstance. This echoed Daoist teachings that have been rising for me as well, particularly the notion of non-action, not as inaction, but as a devotion to discernment. An understanding that my responses, judgments, and intentions remain within my sovereignty, even when the world does not.
Alongside this, I am deepening a practice rooted in my own ancestral traditions of the Norse and Celtic peoples, where wisdom is carried through body, land, breath, and blood. Knowledge that is somatic, rhythmic, and relational. Animus. Emotions that ask for motion and metabolism. Grief that wails. Rage that dances. Desire that sings.
This is where a daily practice of dress enters my life. It is the moment where structure and grounding meet creative expression, where the tangible and actionable intersect with embodied slowing down, and dressing itself becomes a threshold.
When the world is beyond my control, I can still resource myself. I can choose connection, support, visibility, protection, ways my body and spirit know how to hold. Getting dressed becomes the both/and of stoic animus, the first deliberate act of agency in an otherwise unknown day.
“The best revenge is to be unlike [those] who performed the injury.”
Our nervous systems are under siege. Dressing unconsciously allows chaos to make one of the first decisions of the day. Ritual and intention interrupt that momentum.
Through intentional containment, we can get dressed and ask:
Where do I want to feel held, soft, bold, or inconspicuous?
Do I need grounding, expansion, protection, visibility, erotic charge?
Lately, I’ve been returning to the belief that change is more powerfully enacted once we have experienced even a small part of that freedom, support and connection. As I lean more deeply into my artistry, the process feels as important, if not more so, than the product. How I do things is the art; the result is simply the medium through which it moves.
To create a new reality, I have to practice resourcing and presence now, so that what emerges is aligned. My small acts today become the seeds of reality tomorrow.
A SIMPLE OFFERING OF WARDROBE RITUALS FOR UNCERTAIN TIMES
Step 1: Name the weather (in+out)
Today feels foggy
Today feels brittle
Today feels volatile
Step 2: Choose 1 stabilizing element
Structured silhouette
Familiar texture
A color you trust
Step 3: Choose 1 animating element
Skin exposure
Powerful jewelry piece
Scent
Movement friendly cuts/fabric
Step 4: Seal It
Breathe in/out slowly as you button up
Touch the garment and repeat 3x “I choose how I meet the day”
Put on your shoes and notice the feeling of support, your balance and gait, and how the earth is supporting you
In uncertain times, the world wants our nervous system dysregulated, capitalism wants our despair, and crisis wants us isolated and disorganized. But as we choose each action of the day we get to say “ you don't occupy my interior and I won’t go numb to survive.”
* This reflection engages selectively with pieces of Meditations I’ve read rather than endorsing Marcus Aurelius or Stoicism in full. Like many “classical” texts, the work contains perspectives shaped by power, patriarchy, and empire. I approach it critically, in dialogue with embodied, ancestral, and liberatory traditions.