There’s nothing quite as crippling as shoes that don’t quite fit. The kind you can slip your foot into with a grunt of effort, but once in place pinch and squeeze your feet in all the wrong places.
Like the rest of our bodies and minds, our feet have their own unique charm. They have bumps and lumps, and twists and turns that make them especially ours. By forcing them to take the shape of an object so uniform and mass produced as a shoe, these little bits and pieces that make them special need to be crammed and rammed until they assume a form that is pleasing to society’s eye.
But what if I like that one of my feet is bigger than the other?
Or don’t mind so much that I’ve got a huge gap between my big toe and second toe that makes wearing thongs frustratingly tricky?
Or am quite happy to embrace the fact that the mere sight of a stiletto makes the balls of my feet ache?
Every time I deny my feet the freedom to be who they are, I’m telling them that their little lumps and bumps aren’t acceptable. That they need to be smooth and inoffensive and look like everyone else’s.
They might get used to their new restrictive existence, so much so that they don’t even notice the pain of their confines anymore. But every so often something will remind them of their true character. And every time that happens it’ll get tougher to squish them into the same cookie-cutter shapes.
Until eventually they rebel altogether.
A pair of rebellious feet can be quite inconvenient for most, they can step out of line and carry you down a few wrong paths. But at the end of the day, when they no longer feel like they have to conceal their odd bits, those feet can take you to truly incredible places.
Pieces of Elyse 