If If Was a Fifth: The Saying That Built a Brand

My father had a line he pulled out anytime one of us started a sentence with "if only." He'd let us run the whole story — the could've, the should've, the if-they-had-just — and when we finally took a breath, he'd shake his head and say it the same way every time: "If if was a fifth, we'd be drunk right now."

I've been hearing it since I was small. For a long time I thought it was just one of those old Jamaican sayings — something passed down so many times nobody remembers who said it first. The kind of phrase you don't unpack, you just absorb.

The saying behind the name

It took me getting older — and getting honest — to realize my father wasn't just being clever. He was handing me a whole philosophy in nine words.

Every "if only I'd left sooner." Every "if I'd spoken up." Every "if they had loved me the way I needed." Those aren't memories. Those are bottles. And if you drink enough of them, you wake up nowhere new.

The maybes are not a place to live. You can visit, but you can't move in.

What he was really saying

He wasn't dismissing what we felt. He was redirecting it. He knew if he let us sit too long in the hypothetical, we'd forget we had hands. Forget we had choices. Forget the next move belonged to us.

That's how Jamaican wisdom moves — it doesn't coddle you, it calls you. It tells the truth in fewer words than you want to hear. And it trusts you to do something with it.

Why we wear it

F.I.F.T.H. started because I wanted something on my body that reminded me — every time I caught my reflection — that I'd already done the hard part. I had felt it. I had faced it. I had healed (and was still healing) from it. The shirt isn't the work. The shirt is the receipt.

When we put the phrase on a tee, we weren't trying to be cute. We were building a permission slip. Permission to stop rehearsing the past. Permission to stop auditioning for people who already saw the show and left. Permission to choose the version of you that's actually here.

So this is for my father, who said it without knowing it would become a brand. And it's for you, if you've been living in the if. Come back to right now. It's the only place anything ever actually gets built.