Jill Pinnella Corso of Back Home Blog has a post that strikes a chord with me. It’s about shoes.
When I was in my 20s and 30s, I wore a lot of heels. And by that, I mean that I wore heels as a grad student. I was really overdressed for a grad student.
I continued to wear heels, although thanks to the influence of Sex and the City, I gratefully stopped wearing nylons in my early 30s. Seriously, those things are a blight on humanity–they’re hot, they’re uncomfortable, they snag and rip and make you look sloppy with no warning at all. (Kate Middleton, I don’t care how much you love them. You are wrong.)
But the heels continued. When I was dating Mr. Sandwich, I had a collection of cute heels. I kept wearing them until after we were married. Then, one day, as I was walking to the corner, a neighbor in our building said, “I don’t see how you walk in those. They would make my feet hurt!”
That neighbor had some sort of magic powers, because Presto! Change-o! I could no longer wear those shoes. They made my feet hurt.
Then I got a new job, and I started commuting by bus. Which means that I stood a lot, and I discovered very quickly that I didn’t like standing on the bus in heels. It dramatically increased my odds of turning my ankle, and who enjoys that? Not me, anyhow.
For a while, I wore running shoes and brought a dressier option to change into at the office; I even bought a shoe rack so that I could leave shoes at the office rather than lugging them back and forth every day. But I often found that I would have to go straight into a meeting, without the opportunity to upgrade my footwear.
(Then I got pregnant and my shoe options continued to narrow–ironically–until my feet were so swollen that I could only wear Mr. Sandwich’s running shoes.)
When I came back to work, I decided that I needed commuter shoes–something that would be comfortable for the days I had to stand on the bus ride, but that would still look presentable if I had to join a meeting.
Over time, I stopped changing into the heels. The commuter shoes (similar, although I don’t remember paying that much) were just so . . . comfortable.
And while I’ve tried a few pairs of wedges recently, they’re just not as easy to wear as flats.
Plus, really, I don’t need to be taller. I think my height is somewhere around average, but I’m as tall as I need to be.
So I’m done (barring the occasional exception, I suppose) with heels.
Now I just need some new flats.