I want to send a thank you note to the show "What Not to Wear." Actually, I did. I wrote them way back when and thanked them for teaching me that I could wear clothes that flatter my figure and my character. I am 5-10 and weigh 170ish of well-distributed womanhood. I am the product of peasant genes on both sides of my family. I look like one of those women who could pull a plow all day long, give birth to her baby in the field, tuck the newborn in her dress to suckle, and keep plowing because she can just sense that the rain is coming soon and she's got to get the seeds in….you know that kind of woman. This is not a woman who wears certain kinds of women's clothes well. After I grew out of Punk, I never knew what to wear. I was dowdy. Then when I became a Muslim, I added long and baggy to dowdy. Long skirts, long shirts, comfortable shoes. Drab. Why? Partly because I just didn't know how to dress, partly because I just didn't know what dressing modestly meant, and partly because I had no sense of myself as a woman.

The show helped me figure out what kinds of jackets to buy, fitted dress shirts, what kinds of pants, skirts, how to do something trendy without looking foolish, that sort of thing. I discovered those little fitted jackets cover well, yet give me a waist. Those jeans with the small legs and the high waists, very bad. Upside down triangle. Very bad. My body? Better to wear low waisted straight-legs. That style showed less of my real shape than the old jeans and gave me a more modest and actually more attractive look. Who knew?

They have this whole "age-appropriate" attitude on the show. How to look beautiful in an age appropriate way. Turns out age-appropriate means modest. The hosts on "What Not to Wear" kept talking about what clothes "say" about a person. Work clothes, do they "say" professional or lazy slob? Date clothes? Do they "say" I have self-respect or I am a door-mat? I had just started my job at Skidmore and I realized that I had no decent professional clothes. But I also realized that wearing flattering clothes, having a great hair-cut, and showing my beauty did not mean signaling that I was available for no-nonsense no-questions asked fun later that night. I discovered that I could learn the language of clothes.

Now at the time I was still living with my husband who was quite ill so I wasn't looking for make "my husband happy" or "date clothes." But I did start to learn, slowly, through following the dress-rules on the show that I was attractive. I started to learn I could be myself, I could be Muslim, and be attractive. When I finally left him and was living on my own, this was knowledge that came in handy. Date clothes. How do you dress such that a man knows you are somewhat available and yet maintain one's desired boundaries? Well like I was to find out about dating and learning about men and their various types after nearly 15 years with just one man, it would take practice.

I discovered that different clothes made me different people. I could put on a personality, I could put on confidence, I could put on woman, I could put on anything. Now don't you know that required a little self-examination on my part. In other words, who am I now that I am not with "the husband"? My whole Muslim life was with him. I hadn't known much self-respect in my marriage. These clothes I started wearing acted as self-respect costumes. I could wear some of them and put on some self-respect. No connection to the cut or brand. It was only that I was figuring out who I am after all these years. I was picking out and trying on clothes for the person I wanted to become. First and foremost, I wanted to be an intelligent beautiful woman who had self-respect.

So of course that meant I had to own at least one pair of black high-heeled Prada boots.