My worst habit has been wearing shoes that don’t fit. My second worst habit, ketamine, conveniently has a numbing effect. The last time I went to Unter, Brooklyn’s Berlin-coded rave that lasts all night long, I wore a pair of shoes two sizes too small: Diesel booties, with a low heel, peep toe, and an exposed zip. I was being vain, and before I left the house, I was already in pain.
To rank my pain according to the Wong-Baker Faces scale, I’d say the feeling at the start of the night was a two, “hurts little bit,” the face a pinched smile. On the Uber back home the pain was an eight, “hurts whole lot,” the face lacerated by a big frown. I didn’t make it to ten, “hurts most,” with tears. As soon as I collapsed into the backseat, I took the shoes off, and from the car to my apartment front door, I let my fishnet-body-stockinged feet touch cement.
In the dark of a party like that, I’m not sure anyone was paying attention to what I had on my feet. The shoes weren’t for compliments, they were for me: a uniform I suffered to get in the mindset of the fantasy.
Or, I just didn’t realize how bad it would be.
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Why do I even have shoes that don’t fit?
The Diesel booties were a steal, thrifted for $45 and when I tried them on in-store, I thought they felt fine even though I wear 41 and their hardly-touched bottoms were etched with the number 39. The shopping endorphin high must have dulled the pain. Had I even walked around?
I held onto a pair of satin pink strappy platforms for years even though they caused great discomfort because a friend had remembered I’d thought they were pretty in the middle of an overdose and on the way to the hospital she’d told her roommate: give these to Whitney. (Don’t worry, she survived.) This made me sentimental for shoes that pinched in ways that almost caused me to pass out. I wore them to a gala where the clasp of my rhinestone ball evening bag broke and a friend tied it together with a cell phone charger cord, before I spent most of the night leaning against things to put less weight on my pained feet.
I inherited another pair of shoes that were also too small because my boss swiped these Maryam Nassir Zadeh slides from his doorman’s front desk. They were dropped off for a stylist in his building but it’d been irritating him how they’d been sitting there for the better part of a year. Beggars can’t be choosers and they were again the wrong size, but it wasn’t such a problem that my heel hung over the back a bit. The pain came from the single band strap not being wide enough for my foot. Still I wore them until the patent leather looked like shit.
I wore them to a gala where the clasp of my rhinestone ball evening bag broke and a friend tied it together with a cell phone charger cord, before I spent most of the night leaning against things to put less weight on my pained feet.
For years I was in denial I was even a size 41, which is an American 10 or 10.5. I’m purposely giving you the European figure first as a strategy to obfuscate my size. And still sometimes I buy a 40, take for example, my “most comfortable shoes,” Acne sneakers from The RealReal. They were a bargain, but if I walk too far my big-toe toenails will bruise.
Paparazzi photos documented blood stains on the pink ballet slippers Amy Winehouse often wore outside. According to the Daily Mail, they were the result of injecting heroin between her toes. It’s the edgier update on ballerina photography showcasing pointe shoes and the fucked up feet underneath, an early model of the tangled codependence of beauty and pain. I saved these abject images on my computer as a young girl, just like I saved pictures of Amy’s ran-through ballet flats later as a 20-something.
In her memoir The Hard Crowd, Rachel Kushner writes, “Perhaps a person can write about things only when she is no longer the person who experienced them.” Now that I’ve rid my closet of (almost) all the shoes that don’t fit, I can see more clearly what I was hanging onto, unnecessarily causing myself this hurt.
by Whitney Mallett
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