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.

Searching for Thomas Merton in My Handbag

I have a favorite handbag that I’ve carried for years. It is perfect. It holds my files, journal, two kinds of pens, note cards, makeup and money. I love this bag. It cost less than $100. But when I go to New York City I fondle designer bags.  I pet the suede, calfskin and dyed canvas trimmed with leather. One of these bags costs as much as a car payment. But I want one. It’s lust. 

Then at home I look at the books piled on my coffee table, bedside table and desk. Books about personal growth and making a better life and having a spiritual connection and at the top of the pile: Thomas Merton—monk, philosopher, writer.  He had some things I want too: a life of contemplation, simplicity and, oh yes, renunciation.

How do I reconcile these competing and conflicting desires? What is a human to do?  Some of us are dashing around the mall wearing our name off our credit cards and others smugly announce they’re, “Making do with less” this year. I want both, always both.

Consumerism is based on the belief that problems have material solutions. We do it with bigger cars, bigger houses, bigger jobs. But we also do it by consuming more spirituality, trying more spiritual practices or teachers or even religion as “products” to fix our lives.  

Count me in: yoga mat, meditation pillow, charms, chimes, statues, wall hangings, a necklace—gold, expensive—to announce my belief in God. Even recovery jewelry. I buy more things to proclaim my belief in simplicity.

Yes, we all use consumption to create our identity. But it’s equally flawed to create a self-image based on refusing to participate in the dominant culture or by disdaining those who do.  The fundamental error is the same: whether we derive our identity from consuming or from not consuming we’re still focused on self.  Spiritual wanting is still wanting. 

How perfect that it’s a bag I’m craving now. I can look in my handbag—literally a sack to carry my identity—to see who I am. It holds my driver’s license, medical cards, reward

cards for the stores I shop—my cell phone address book displays the details of what and who matters. But I still think the outside of this bag—calfskin would be nice—will change the inner me.

As recovering women, we live at the intersection of spirituality and consumption. Could we choose peace in our hearts and at the mall? I am searching for Thomas Merton in my handbag and hoping for peace in my very human heart.

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More on recovery, shopping and style in "Out of the Woods" published by Central Recovery Press.

So Sari--A New Me

After years in recovery—teamed with years in therapy-- you can begin to believe that you have a handle on yourself. You might start to think that you are onto your own tricks. And then...

Here is the latest peek at myself. I love handbags and about a month ago in a chic, high-end catalog I saw a tote bag that was described as being made from old Indian saris—those traditional long wrap dresses that Indian women wear. The photos showed the bags in vibrant colorful prints and each had a long leather strap that could be worn across the body.

They were only $98. Of course that’s over $100 with tax and delivery, but I had paid much more for other handbags and there was something about the soft fabric of the old saris; I mean it would have some other—older Indian—woman’s karma right? And for spring/summer I could envision this soft bag across my body with khaki skirts or jeans and sandals. A nice look.

So I ordered the bag. The website said it would take seven days. I told myself, “Expect it in ten. I was already trying hard to manage my desire. So I wait the week and three days. I pass up other purses when I shop, “Nope, the old sari bag, slouched just so across my body, with its soft silk and aged leather…I can feel it all –I was living that new bag and UPS hasn’t arrived yet.

But then it does. I come home to “the box”. It’s here! I’m excited. But then I open the box and there is a lumpy, kind of laundry-bag looking sack. It is made of old fabric yes, but the bag is huge and droopy, and the strap is cheap, shiny leather.  I sling it across my body and I recognize the look. I demonstrate for my husband: I bend and scoop, bend and scoop. It looks like the kind of cloth sling that women wore to work in the fields. This is not chic, not cool, not very nice. It has no Karma. I’m disappointed.

But it’s what happens next that surprises me. I know that I don’t want THIS bag, and I want my money back. That is clear. My husband says, “Send it back and get something you like.” Yes, of course. That makes sense, but something is holding me back. I try on the sari cloth bag again. I empty my current handbag and put all the contents into the new sari bag hoping that somehow having my things inside will transform this purse into MY purse. Nope. It just looks even droopier now--like an old laundry bag. 

So what’s holding me back? It’s not until I am filling out the return form and packing the sari bag in the return carton to that I realize what my trouble is. It’s not just the bag I have to return, it’s the new identity that I’d constructed in my head. In the ten short days from ordering the bag to receiving the bag I had created a new me to go with the bag: I was going to be causally chic, I was going to be the kind of woman who wore old sari cloth with khaki and denim and simple sandals, I was going to be the slightly bohemian, somewhat hippy-ish chick, that tossed a bag like this across her body and…and…

And what? Maybe I imagined that I’d laugh more, worry less, be more comfortable in my body. I’d sit in coffee shops and I wouldn’t sweat the small stuff.  I’d be at peace and love stillness and be relaxed. And I'd be wise. In my shoppers imagination this sari bag was going to bring that to me. In ten days I had created a new me and done a kind of geographic cure without even leaving my house.

And then the UPS man took my bag and delivered reality right back to me.

Fashion and Faith

Maybe this is a recovering women’s issue? Maybe men have a version of this but I don’t know about it. What I do know is that throughout my recovery I’ve had a running internal debate that goes like this: 

Voice One: I’m becoming a spiritual person now so clothing and make up and hair color does not matter. 

Voice Two: But I’m a happier person now too because of recovery and feeling good about myself, I want my outsides to match my insides. 

Voice One: God doesn’t care about hair color...

Voice Two: God cares about beauty and happiness so if being a blonde or having “warm” highlights makes me happy what’s the big deal?

Even after almost thirty years it continues. And throughout all this recovery I’ve tried following each voice...each one to an extreme perhaps --and then I let that pendulum swing the other way.

William Merritt Chase

In my first months of attending 12 step meetings I went shopping for “meeting clothes”. All of my life I had medicated my feelings with substances—food, booze, drugs and always there was a corresponding adjustment to my appearance, so why wouldn’t recovery need its own attire? I heard many years later that some women had sponsors who told them to dress up when they went to meetings, they should look their best, and to work recovery from the outside in. “Suit up and Show up” they were told.

I suspect that for the addicted woman who got to the stage of never brushing her teeth or changing out of sweats that could be a good way to go, but I was of the other breed that was overly invested in my appearance. So rather than learning to wash my hair and put on lipstick I really needed to experiment with “come as you are” and even “come at your worst” to learn that I’d still be loved and accepted.

In very early recovery when I was on my holier-than-thou cloud I decided to give up make

up and hair color, to only shop at thrift stores so as to be the “real” me. Luckily I had a sponsor who spent the equivalent of my weekly salary on her hair each month. When I professed my spiritual breakthrough and austerity she gave me a long look and said, “You didn’t get sober to wear sackcloth and ashes. So go get some highlights.”

Then a few years later I was having some success at work.  I was in a good job and enjoying secular success and peace in recovery. I spent some money with a personal shopper who advised that I needed a power suit, a silky red dress and who came to my apartment and went through my closet with me. It was sort of a sartorial personal 4th step inventory. (I actually did tell her all my clothing stories so it was kind of a closet catharsis). But after buying all those shiny new clothes I felt a bit too exposed and well, too shiny. I found that most of those new “dress for success” duds belonged more to an idea I had about myself than to my actual self. So the pendulum swung again.

Back and forth it’s gone over these recovering years. I have a wardrobe I like now and most

of it looks like it belongs to the same person. I make those “shopping in pain” mistakes still. (The H.A.L.T. advice should apply to shopping as well as drinking.) But my stages of rock star; tweedy intellectual, corporate power leader and cute girlfriend have gradually integrated into a closet that, for the most part, reflects who I really am.

The hook to change my outsides is still there though. My first thought whenever I contemplate an inner change is always to wonder what the external equivalent should be. 

So what does a sober, sane, happy woman look like? I think she looks like herself --and her best self—knowing that even that very self is constantly changing.


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I loved writing about shopping, clothes and recovery in "Out of the Woods--A Woman's Guide to Long-term Recovery."

Getting Up and Dressing Up in Recovery

Writer and poet, Mary Karr, who wrote “The Liar’s Club”—her memoir of growing up in a crazy family, and also “Lit” --my favorite chronology of getting sober—gave me one of my favorite lines about getting dressed. Karr credits her father with this comment as he observed her clothing choices:

“Mary, there’s a fine line between an outfit and a get-up.”

Isn’t that a perfect distinction?

Today I chose to wear a get-up: My pink, vintage Peck & Peck wool coat. (It has little fringes on the four perfectly placed Chanel style pockets). I added a polka dot wool scarf that is color-blocked in pink, green, yellow and red, and I added a rose-colored baseball cap, and my “Obama-Green” gloves, so named because they are the exact gloves that Michelle Obama wore at the first Presidential Inauguration (and which I had been wearing years before her stylist found them at J. Crew. No one wanted that weird green before she wore them with her yellow coat on that freezing day.)

I felt festive and happy—and smiling-- in this colorful get-up as I ran my errands. 

It is long recovery that lets me have this kind of happy, get-up day. There is so much freedom to both care and not care what I look like. And to know that tomorrow I can make another choice and feel peaceful in head-to-toe taupe, or a navy suit and pearls. Dress as me? I am all of them. 

We are told in recovery not to compare our insides to someone else’s outsides, but we also have to learn to align our insides and our own outsides, that is to allow ourselves to enjoy both “get-ups” and outfits as we dress for our wonderful, recovered lives.


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There is a chapter on clothing and recovery in, "Out of the Woods--A Guide to Long-term Recovery" published by Central Recovery Press.