UP FOR GRABS

I keep thinking about the phrase: it’s still up for grabs. After reading Kismet magazine’s demonic/divine run down this past week where the 250th marking of the US is held as both/and “still up for grabs”.

So I’ve been chewing on these ideas. The country. The self. The body. The future. The way we dress. The way we belong. The way we refuse. The way we become.

There is something terrifying and divine in realizing that what feels enormous, fixed, and immovable is often still being made. The United States, at 250 years, is still a young and violent experiment. So much of it is unresolved, undefined, still being fought over, still being claimed, still being rewritten. And if something this large, something this powerful, something moving so quickly in directions that often oppose our deepest values, is still up for grabs, then maybe it reflects a bigger possibility in our own lives.

Not in the false promise that we can control everything. Not in the capitalist fantasy of reinvention as personal branding. Not in “fake it till you make it.” But in the deeper, older, more embodied sense that we still have agency. We still have movement. We still have choice. We still have the ability to interrupt a pattern, change direction, cut our hair, change our clothes, try the thing, stop performing the version of ourselves that no longer fits, move towards liberation.

Our becoming is still up for grabs.

This is part of what Wardrobe Rituals is here to practice. Style is not surface. It is not vanity. It is not hyper-individuality. It is one of the daily places where we meet ourselves and decide, again, how we are willing to be seen. Clothing becomes a site of action. A small lever. A spell. A refusal. A rehearsal. A way to make contact with the self before the world names us for us.

We begin with who we are and how we came to be. The lineage, the rupture, the inheritance, the chosen family, the forced family, the ancestral dream before colonization and enslavement, before shame, before containment. Perhaps moving both forward and backwards in time, a past that only exists in the future. We are ancient beings in temporary bodies. Our garments adorn these ancestral manifestations. Our clothes touch the body that carries memory, DNA, spirit, history, survival, desire, and magic.

And then we choose.

We choose what to keep. What to release. What to repair. What to wear forward. What to let die. What to make visible. What to protect. What to adorn.

This is not just about wanting things to be different. It is about making one small movement in a different direction.

Because things are up for grabs when we grab them.

Life is not fixed. Liberty is not fixed. Identity is not fixed. Style is not fixed. Even death, through the lens of thermodynamics, makes life feel like a temporary rebellion against entropy. A brief and luminous resistance to collapse.

So let’s use it.

Use our body. Use our clothes. Use our rituals. Use our longing. Use our adornment. Use our anger. Use our softness. Use our life.

Use it responsibly.

Use it revolutionarily.

More will be revealed.