Lessons from a shoe closet

I did try out the forgotten inmates of my shoe prison, eh, closet, yesterday.
One pair that looked cute on the outside, but when worn became pretty uncomfortable after a short while.
And another that didn´t look half as cute, just sensible, but was so comfy that it may well become a new summer favorite.
If I look past its unassuming exterior, that is.

The experience got me thinking about how often I tend to go by the exterior of something and miss out on the inner qualities it may have.
And how often I have, in the past, decided to ignore discomfort going on with a particular shoe or garment because "it looked so good".

My Granny-who all her life was a sensible-shoes kind of person- used to say "the place you wear an uncomfortable shoe is in your face".

And it´s true, I have often spent whole days with a drawn look in my face and clenched teeth because the shoes I wore hurt like hell.
Part of that was due to the sad fact that my feet kept getting bigger with weight gain. I chose to ignore that for a long time, squeezing my feet into shoes that had what used to be my size. Of course, by noon at latest, I could only hobble.
But, as with my weight gain, I somehow managed to ignore the fact that there had to be something wrong for my feet to hurt so much.
Until the day when an attentive shopping assistant (to whom I am grateful to this day) noticed how I had to squeeze into the shoes she brought me to try on and made me have my feet measured.
The result? My feet needed shoes two sizes bigger than what I had come into the store in. No wonder there had been so much pain.
Astonishingly, the paramount feeling wasn´t one of relief at knowing what the problem was, but regrets at "losing" my small feet. Having the smallest shoe size had been a matter of pride for me. I might not be slim, but I had dainty little feet.  And now, all of a sudden, my feet were average-sized. That took some getting used to at first.
And, of course, it meant letting go of all the smaller-sized shoes that had become instruments of self-inflicted torture. 
Only when I realized, after some time of wearing the better-fitting footwear, that I had no more pain in my feet did I understand how much I had been hurting myself by not facing up to the changed size of my feet.

The lesson in that goes a long way beyond simple footwear.
If I don´t face up to changes, be it in my body or in my life,  I´m going to hurt myself sooner or later. And the hurt won´t stop before I acknowledge what has changed and act accordingly.


Julia