Step Three for Fashionistas

Ok, as we all know Step Three says: ‘Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.” And all of us who have been around a bit know that even though this says “made a decision” it really is a process of many decisions made over a period of time.

In early recovery we may have a ceremony or make a formal ritual and we “take” Step Three with our sponsor. That is a brave act of considerable intimacy. Later, often when life is hard, we take it again. Spiritual maturity teaches us that sooner or later we’re gonna turn it over so why not sooner rather than later. I like to say that instead of waiting to hit the wall I like to take Step Three when I see the wall coming.

So it’s a process and our spiritual growth deepens with each layer—each area of our lives that we eventually surrender. I have taken a Third Step on relationships, money, work, jobs and even cars. I learned this great phrase form a spiritual teacher: “Give yourself to God. Surrender your whole being to be used for His righteous purposes.” 

Note: It says your whole being.

This year I had a revelation about a new layer of surrender in front of me: What I look like.

I have always cared about my appearance. Clothes, face and hair. Superficial? Not very spiritual? Maybe, but in early recovery  when I was getting very very spiritual and perfect, and when I had taken that first ceremonial Third Step, I decided that I was too spiritual for hair color, make up and such, yes superficial things. 

Luckily I had a sponsor who was tall and blonde and stylish –and very sober--and she said, “God does not want you to wear sackcloth and ashes, God loves you, now go get some highlights back in your hair.” Turns out I was just using the “I’m too spiritual for makeup” as another way to impress and people please and try to convince God to like me. 

My sponsor said, “Cut that out, this is about attraction rather than promotion. Do you want new women to think they have to look awful?”

But flash forward 25 years and I am daily surrendering work and my artwork and my marriage and money and most aspects of my life. But also on most days I am agonizing over my hair. I still can’t find that gamine cut that leave me looking pretty and smart all at the same time, kind of like Susan Sontag in a bikini. 

So it hit me: I have turned over everything else so why not how I look? Does that seem weird? I thought so too. But it was just a wild enough idea and worth a try. So I’m doing it. Like most other surrenders there are two parts: God’s and mine. Like getting a new job I have to ask for God’s will but then I still have to go and rewrite my resume. In this case I have to do a modest amount of self-care and then let go of the rest.

No Comfort in Comfort Shoes

 I see these shoes all over now. My demographic is big and booming so we drive the market for all kinds of consumer products. And now every women’s store offers “Comfort Shoes.” They are sold through catalogs like, Modern Maturity and All About You, which are supposed to be celebrating your mid-life. But I’m also seeing these shoes at Bloomingdales and dear God, even Saks.   There are all kinds of euphemistic names for these shoes like On the Move  or Comfort Footwear, but ya know what? These are old lady shoes. 

A friend brought a catalog to our lunch date to show me a pair of these comfort shoes that she was considering buying for a special event. “They look so comfortable” she says, “but are they too dowdy?”  How do I answer that without hurting her feelings? I look at the shoe and I say to my friend, “Maybe go for something a little more strappy; you don’t have to walk in them.” But what I really want to say is, “Those are shoes for a woman who has forgotten what her vagina is for.” 

Yes, I know that these shoes feel comfy but it’s a slippery slope. One day you allow yourself to wear these “comfort shoes” and within a week you are buying a pink jogging suit decorated with gold emblems, and thinking, “Oh, that looks nice.”  Or you buy a pair of  shoes with these “manmade breathable uppers” and “soft rubbery soles” and soon after you are thinking, “Why pay all that money for someone else to put color on my hair; I could just buy a box of that hair dye that Sarah Jessica Parker uses. She always looks so nice.”  

Maybe it really is about chemistry: You buy a pair of comfort shoes in a “nice, practical” navy or worse, in ivory, and after a few wearings the chemicals from the shoes enter your bloodstream and soon you begin to think that pants with an elastic waist make perfect sense. I mean, after all, you gain a little weight now and then so wouldn’t it be nice if you didn’t need to buy new pants every time you gain a few pounds?

Or you begin to think that you don’t really need to buy new underwear every year. You could just buy one of those “bra extenders” and get more life out of your old bras. Did you ever really go to the hospital and have someone see your raggedy drawers? No, of course not.  

It all begins with the shoes.

Guard yourself and help your friends too. Comfort shoes are a frightening thing. They are the end of sex and the end of independent thought. In comfort shoes you will give up reading new fiction and listening to public radio. You will soon claim that you don’t know who Arianna Huffington is and you will think the red string on Madonna’s wrist is to remind her to buy a birthday card for her mother. When we talk about end of life issues—we are talking about comfort shoes. 

So I have this special request: When I am going to be buried or even if I am going to be cremated, please do not put “comfort shoes” on my feet. You can go with gold sandals, even a simple Ferragamo pump if you have to, or rubber thongs. Because wherever I go from here, it’s still about putting my best foot forward.

Facing the Fountain of Youth

It has been said that the line between youth and age is the point when you stop yearning to look older and begin to hope you look younger. The search for youth is an old--and timely-- story. It was five hundred years ago this week that the explorer  Ponce de Leon, searching for the fountain of youth, claimed Florida as his discovery.

That makes us laugh today because we may think of Florida as the Fountain of Aging giving its reputation as a retirement destination. Or maybe it’s a fountain of youth denial given the prevalence of plastic surgery. But Ponce de Leon was just one of many who had sought the secret of youth. The ancient story of the search for the Holy Grain was also a search for a way to stay forever young.

Today those with the same desire have an endless bounty of pseudo-miracles to prolong our appearance of youth. We have lasers, Botox and plastic surgery. And many of us know the shock of the mirror and the discrepancy between what we feel like versus what we look like in that reflection.

There is also a cultural disappointment as so many of us age together and the pressure to look young intensifies. Years ago when the middle-aged “Baby Boom” was predicted we imagined that having an older majority would mean more acceptance of aging. We were wrong. Rather than the demographic bump offering us permission to de-babe, it has instead created even more pressure to not go gently into our wrinkles and gray hair.

How does this apply to us as people in recovery? Well, if you’ve been around awhile or you plan to be in recovery a long time –you’ll need to come to terms with your beliefs and choices around aging and appearance. Just as we keep examining our insides we also do have to face our faces and come to terms with our outsides. And yes this does hit woman harder than men. Again, culture.

Sure we can blame media and marketing but the focus on “them” ignores the fact that the search for youth is not really about looking younger. What Ponce de Leon and those who sought the Grail wanted was not a cosmetic fix but immortality. They wanted to not die.

And of course many of us came into recovery because we didn’t want to die—at least not the way we were going to if we kept using. But the truth is that we will die and recovery offers us the chance to relay think that through. Only when we understand that we’re going to die do we ask the crucial questions:  What do you want to do with your life? And with whom do you want to spend your precious time? Maybe accepting death –really accepting it—is the best secret to living young.

As so many of us—and I’m in here too—try to erase our age with lotions and lasers we are trying to change reality. But that may also be magical thinking, just like looking for the fountain of youth. 

Reclaiming My Face

I’m alone on Cape Cod this week. I am here to write for a week and I have a house and a beach and some woods to myself. It’s heaven. Every couple of years I get the chance to do this and each time it takes just 36 hours to drop down into a deep place, and everything else falls away. And that includes caring about how I look.

A few years ago I was on a month-long writing retreat. I lived in a barn with a bedroom and an art studio and I didn’t care about clothes or hair or even bathing. I didn’t wear any make up for a month and I liked how I looked. But at the end of 30 days I began to wonder if I could go back into my “normal” world without make up?

I think about that now. What is the difference between this face I like on retreat and my discomfort with this same face in my other life?

In early recovery I used to wonder in any new situation, “Who do I go as?” The question was tribute to my years of people pleasing. A breakthrough moment was the day that it came to me that, “I can go as me.” There was a “me” there!

As I packed to leave the retreat I began to ask, Can I go another week without make up? Can I go 21 days? I wanted make up to be a choice and not something that I have to do. If I can be in the world without make up then make up can be a choice. Can I use makeup but not be defined by it?

When I talked to my sponsor I said, “I think I’m reclaiming my face”.

If this is what I really look like, I don’t want to hide that --especially from myself. I don’t want to be afraid of my own face.

It’s timing of course. Many of us admire the freedom of appearance of someone like Georgia O’Keefe but most of us admire her 90-year-old, desert-artist face. Yes, I may be willing to look like a chic, elegantly wrinkled woman when I’m 90, but what about at 57 and 67 and 77? The face we fret over most is the getting-old face rather than the being-old face.

Maybe this reclaiming of my face is reclaiming of my mortality. If I change the appearance of my face does that change what is inside? Face-lifts might make us look younger but they don’t make us be younger. Botox may make us look less worried but it doesn’t make us less worried, it simply disguises an even greater worry. 

My Face

Another gift from my week in Florida when I had no cosmetics. I felt so strange at first then I realized that my husband kept looking just like himself but when I looked in the mirror I looked so different.

So I decided to go without makeup for a week after I came home. I became my own experiment and my own work of art. I also decided to not talk about what I was doing. No explanations. I saw people looking at me; some asked if I was tired. I said “No”, but decided to not talk away the experience. My husband—smart man—did not ask. And I didn’t tell.

It is freeing. I love makeup and being a girly girl but I realized in my cosmetic-free week that I want make-up to be a choice. I don’t want to be afraid of my face or ashamed of my face. I want make-up to be decoration and not a mandate or a mask.