This is post #500, and I feel like it should be about something monumental and important, that I should be marking the occasion with profundity and wit.
Instead, I am going to write about myself and my shoes and my feet.
My feet have been a vanity for me for a long, long time. Even when I was at my least girly, I loved wearing sandals and having neatly painted toenails, and open-toed shoes in the office were a violation of professional dress that I committed with willful joy. I have nice feet, and as long as I take care of them, they look good, even when the rest of me does not.
It’s not just my feet, though. Feet in general are awesome. Anyone who has been to my classes a few times has probably heard me riff on feet during shoulderstand. It is good to look up to your feet sometimes. They do so much for you, root you to the earth, take you everywhere you need to go, even while stuffed into uncomfortable shoes. Look at them, get to know them, love them, so sayeth Lauren, the champion of the foot.
First blog shoe pic (I think). 5/18/09.
Over the past year, as this blog moved from being a journal that just happened to be public to something consciously created for public consumption, I started paying closer attention to patterns in my posts, and realized that I write about shoes and feet (and fiction and frolic and food) an awful lot, and thus the tagline was born. I also started minding other widely read blogs, and learned to take advantage of the platform not just as a verbal medium, but as a visual medium, too. So, instead of just writing about shoes a lot, there were pictures of shoes with my feet in them, which didn’t bother me a bit, because, hey, my feet look good.
This was the beginning of developing an online persona, which really, truly, is just me, in blog form. I don’t know if I became the blog or the blog became me, but a year later, here I am, in all of my shoeyness.
Along the way a funny thing happened to my vanity. The more I looked at my feet and the more readers I brought on who also looked at my feet, the more I started to notice the flaws. Where once I would snap a picture or two of a pair of sandals, crop it and post, I now take quite a few, because I see every little asymmetry, every ridge in the nail polish, the way that the third and fourth toes on my right foot press down at a funny angle when I stand, causing a divot at the knuckle (Are toe joints knuckles? Toe knuckles?), how if I lean a certain way to get the picture my little toes start to turn sideways, I notice all of it. A couple of weeks ago I caught myself liking my feet less and for the first time ever, wishing that this thing or the other about them were different.
I’m over it, but it was a wake up call about vanity. The criticism really comes to life around the things are actually the most beautiful and the most unique, the most me. I am this way about my hair, my nose, my writing… it took me twenty years to figure out that that the thing in my writing that I found weird and awkward was really the “voice” that always got high praise.
I know this isn’t just me. I invite my readers who are rolling into middle age with me to take a quick scan of the features -physical or otherwise- that stoke the most self-criticism and treat them with some kindness. They have carried you through the world this far. Treat yourself with some kindness, please. Love you. I do.
All that said, for those of you who read this far, a peripherally shoe-related loose end: back in January when I won the smut contest, I promised I would post a picture of myself in the little schoolgirl skirt I won. It is not that I have been holding out, I just forgot, and picking up last Misbehaving Tuesday’s saddle shoes today reminded me. So, here it is, right in time for post #500:
