This series will contain posts styled as a memoir with memories that I feel like sharing. I first wrote these articles in 2017 when I was suffering from burnout. I may post one or two a month. I hope you enjoy these intimate glimpses into the life of...
Episode 4
Big Foot in Heels
There was this woman I have a memory of from my childhood; a black woman who wore bright purple lipstick. She enchanted me with her purple lipstick. One day, she gave my mom a bag of shoes. I spilled them out on her small, concrete porch and saw a pair of red heels. These were the old-fashioned kind that covered most of the foot with a short, stubby heel. How marvelous! High heels! Red high heels! I was only about four, and I knew that red high heels were important, powerful. Now, when I see a woman wearing red high heels, or Christian Louboutin red sole pumps, I see the power she exudes. She’s confident. She’s fierce. And I wish I was like her, but I have big feet.
My feet started to grow past the normal size when I was in the fifth grade, and my dad started to call me Big Foot. I laughed. He was teasing me. After all, he has very big feet. But when my feet continued to grow, becoming disproportionate to my height, becoming noticeable, I started to hate my feet. His silly nickname started to bother me. My feet were ugly. They were a boy's feet.
In middle school, my feet got noticed. More specifically, my shoes got noticed. I couldn’t find cute shoes to wear. None of the stores had nice shoes in my size. In 8th grade, I had a pair of black and white shoes that looked normal until you saw the Velcro straps. Velcro straps are for kids, but they were the only shoes Walmart had in my size. If I wore pants, you couldn’t tell when I was standing, but if you looked when I was seated, you’d see the straps.
Once, this popular boy pointed out that I shouldn’t do the strap like that. He redid them so the straps were stuck to each other and sticking up, almost like bunny ears. This was apparently the cool way to wear shoes, like basketball shoes, with Velcro straps. But my shoes would get too loose when I walked, so back the straps went the right way.
One day at lunch, I stood next to my cheerleader best friend and her group. I was on the outskirts, like a gnat lingering too close. I looked over to see a group of girls pointing at my shoes and laughing. I was wearing capris, so the Velcro straps were on full display. They were making fun of me, and it hurt. A lot. They didn’t know how much I hated my big feet. They didn’t know my struggle. They didn’t know that these were the best shoes I could find, that my parents would pay for, and that I actually liked them, despite how humiliated I’d feel if someone saw those damn Velcro straps.
***
These are the same girls, who, sometime after this, were talking to my best friend’s group and saw my nail polish, a bright neon green that I loved. The meanest of the group, the one who was doing the most pointing at my shoes, looked at my nails and said, right to my face, that it looked like I had fungus on my nails. My cheeks warmed as my best friend and her friends looked on.
No one said anything. I don’t even recall if any of them smiled or chuckled. All I could see was this girl whose name I never knew and her friends laughing. All I could hear were the words “fungus.” This was my favorite nail polish color. It did not look like fungus!
I didn't remove my polish when I got home, but I kept it on until it started to chip. Why should they bully me into removing my favorite nail polish? What they did was worse, though. They embarrassed me and made me ashamed of my favorite nail polish. I didn’t wear it to school again.
However, this color remains to be my favorite nail polish color. I even did a reel about it and this very memory. It got a pretty nice response on TikTok.
***
Anyway, back to shoes.
That same year, my dad brought me to a shoe store. We asked the owner if they had shoes in my size. They did, but they were for boys. My dad didn’t want to leave the store without shoes, so I was forced to pick out a pair. I chose a white shoe with red lines. They looked like clown shoes when I had them on. I HATED them. I wore them to school only a few times and then refused to wear ever again. A boy I had a crush on touched them when I wore them to school the first time. He said they were cool, and he could’ve meant it, but I was humiliated by them. I didn’t want anyone to see how enormous they were. Or that they were for boys. Especially not those girls. Luckily, they didn't notice.
***
In 10th grade, after I had spine surgery, I had a black pair of heels with straps. The heels were short and long, like wedges. They were the only heels I could actually walk in. I did not like flipflops or sandals, as they showed off my manly feet, so I wore these wedges when I had on my red and pink bohemian skirt that went to my ankles. I loved my outfit. I felt pretty. I had worn it a few times before that year, such as for picture day, but that day, when I was walking through the courtyard to where my friends hung out before the bell, I heard a boy shout, “Look, it’s big foot.”
My face seared with humiliation. I knew instantly that I was “big foot.” No one else was around.
I looked over to see my ex-best friend sitting with a group of people I didn’t know. And they were all looking at me, laughing. I turned my head away, as if I didn’t care, and kept on walking. But I couldn’t shake that. When I wore that skirt again and those shoes, and when I walked the same path in the morning to my spot, I braced myself for the jokes. They didn’t come again. Maybe because, I noticed, my ex-best friend wasn’t among them anymore. Or maybe because they didn’t care anymore. Or perhaps they were laughing under their breaths. I don’t know, but I was grateful that it didn’t reoccur. I never had the confidence I once had when I wore that outfit any other time.
***
People have asked me my shoe size. I always ask, “What size do you think I wear?”
They always answer size 9. Um. Size 9 is big? Really? I wish I was a size 9 shoe! I let them believe it, though. Truth is, my feet were much bigger than that. Back then, I wore a size 12. It seems my feet have shrunk, because now I'm an 11 or a 10, depending on the shoe.
While writing this, I saw an article online that shared celeb shoe sizes from smallest to biggest and stated that at the end of the day, no one notices, and that the female celebs in their article were gorgeous whether they had small or big feet. Their biggest size went to 10 and listed celebs like Kendall Jenner, Khloe Kardashian, Heidi Klum, and Angelina Jolie. I looked at the beautiful photos of these celebs showing off their bare feet and did not see my feet at all. It said that Angelina Jolie’s feet were called “weird” and “gigantic” once when she did a Louis Vuitton ad. If people can be nasty about the stunning Angelina Jolie’s size 10 feet, imagine if her feet were a size 12 and she wasn’t as stunning or famous. Imagine a girl like me.
But a glass slipper can be a size 5 or a size 12.
