Clothes can be Fun

Poet, Mary Karr, who wrote “The Liar’s Club”, A terrific memoir about growing up in a crazy family wrote one of my favorite lines about dressing. She credits her father with this comment:

“There is a fine line between an outfit and a get-up.”

Today I was wearing a get-up. Pink vintage Peck & Peck wool coat. (It has little fringes on the four perfectly placed pockets). A wool scarf with polka dots and blocks of red, green, yellow and pink. A pink ball cap with a flower in green on the bill and my Obama green gloves—so named because they are THE gloves that Michelle Obama wore at the Inauguration and which I had been wearing for years. (I bought them on sale because no one wanted that weird green—until now.)

I felt festive and happy in this little get-up as I ran errands.

It is sobriety that lets me have this kind of happy, get-up day. To care and not care what I look like. To know that tomorrow I can wear a navy suit and pearls and big-girl shoes, and still be me.

We are told in recovery not to compare out insides to someone else’s outsides, but we must also learn to align our insides and our own outsides—and to allow both get-ups and outfits as we dress for these good lives.