It was just after the first of the year, and for no reason in particular that I can recall, when I got dressed that morning, I picked out a pair of shoes that I hadn't worn in a while. I'd bought them in high school, and though they were among the cutest shoes I'd owned at the time, they weren't quite up to snuff with the rest of my wardrobe as of late.
By the end of the day, I'd made the always-traumatic decision to give them away. (If you know me, you know I'm abnormally attached to inanimate objects, and yes, everything I've ever given to the thrift store has suffered brief abandonment issues.) It helped greatly that I'd spent the whole day in them, though, thus making an informed decision that these shoes were maybe no longer best suited for me, instead of just the off-the-cuff "well, I haven't worn these in a while" giveaway that would surely cause me to run back to the thrift store and buy them back. (For the record, that has only ever happened one time.)
Leave it to Christy to take this one tiny morsel of information about my closet and turn it into a six-month-long project.
"Hey," she says to me, "Why don't you wear ALL the shoes you haven't worn in a while and see if you can give any of them away? And while you're at it, how about just wearing every pair of shoes you own? Remember, we're almost the same shoe size, but this is in no way related to my suggestion...but if it were, I'll take anything you don't want anymore. Out of the goodness of my heart, of course."
Or something like that. ;) Christy, darling, I kid. But seriously, she was the mastermind behind this game plan. It became a challenge: wear every pair of shoes in my closet. From the most comfy flats up to the most ridiculous pair of stilettos (shockingly, it only took me a month or so to dig out the gold glitter pumps--it was Mardi Gras!), I was to make my way through my entire shoe closet, top to bottom, and wear everything in it.
First we set some ground rules: 1. I was only allowed one pair of shoes per day (no midday wardrobe changes), and 2. I had to wear every pair before repeating any. Piece of cake, right? The next thing I did was check out a calendar, see just how long I was going to be wrapped up in this little challenge of ours. Imagine my surprise when I realized it was going to carry me all the way into summer! (I shouldn't have been surprised, I know.) So I had to develop a strategy. Wear all my boots before the inevitably brief Alabama winter gave way to warmer weather. Make sure I set aside an appropriate pair for a wedding I already knew about, and a couple more pairs for any I didn't. I started out trying to balance flats with heels, but unfortunately the bulk of my heels are sandals, and that didn't work out well even for Alabama winter conditions, which ultimately led to me wearing high heels almost nonstop for the last month and a half or so...but we'll get there.
In the beginning, it was just fun, picking out my lesser-worn shoes every day and taking them out for a spin--though rationing them was admittedly a bit of a challenge from the get-go. What if I waste a pair of rainboots on a drizzle and I don't have them later when it's pouring? But this is my only pair of red pumps, what if I absolutely have to have red pumps for something down the road? Do I even have enough red and houndstooth shoes to get me through a whole spring sports season? Eventually I had to just bite the bullet and wear what I wanted, when I wanted. I mean, just when I thought it couldn't possibly take me any longer to get dressed in the morning...
It was nice, too, to get back into my old fashionista habits. I used to wear heels all the time, but out of necessity broke myself of it when I was
hiking across campus to class every day for four and a half years, and never really got back into it after I left college. But sitting at a desk all day with the occasional walk around the office to talk to a coworker or get some coffee is no more prohibitive to heels than the short walks to change classes were--on the nicely tiled hallways of my high school, that is. So why wasn't I already taking the opportunity to channel my inner Stacy London? I suddenly had no idea.
But aside from the fun of it, the challenge quickly revealed itself to be a productive endeavor, too. There were a few pairs right off the bat that I knew I could part with, either out of discomfort (and you know it takes a lot for me to consider a shoe too uncomfortable to put up with), or the fact that they were from a less-refined style of my youth. In fact, as I sit here looking at my list, the most recent purchase of any that are under consideration for thrift store fate is from my freshman year of college (almost six years ago--yikes! Am I that old already?), so that's really what's done most of them in, though I can name a couple of pairs that weren't particularly easy on my feet. At the final count, there are 17 pairs that are either for sure to get rid of or question marks--but I think if I'm even considering it, I ought to just part ways with shoes that have well-served me for over half a decade. But let's face it, we won't know for sure if that's really going to happen until I make the drop at the thrift store. (I did, after all, just tell you previous donations had abandonment issues. It's not like I'm talking about a puppy I left at the pound, here.)
As we went along through the weeks and months, it got to be more of a challenge picking out shoes in the morning as I ran further and further out of options (take that with a grain of salt--we're talking dilemmas like only having two pairs of black pumps to choose from instead of five), and the options that I did have were looking crazier and crazier as they became undiluted by the sensible flats, pumps, and sandals of my collection that I was fast running out of. Example: I don't think I thought through the decision to buy the slutty-looking five-and-a-half-inch platform gladiator heels any further than "These are going to fit right in on Bourbon Street" when I purchased them not long before the bachelorette party that took me there. But did I wear them to work last week, down to single digits left in my shoe challenge? Yes, yes I did.
Fortunately, even pairs that I would consider pretty normal registered as "crazy Laura shoes" with my coworkers, so I don't know that any particular pair fazed them more than any others. And in an office with a more corporate dress code, there's no way this challenge would have even made it off the ground, so by and large, the challenging part was me actually walking around in five-inch heels all day. Not that I couldn't (or didn't) do it, mind you, but it altered my daily routine a bit. Like, just how badly do I need these things on my grocery list? Do I need to go to Wal-Mart in my five-inch heels, or can it wait until tomorrow for a lower heel?
It stopped mattering about a month and a half ago, when I realized that I was down to an alarmingly low number of flat shoes. As much as I love my stilettos--the crazy, the five-inch, the slutty-looking, all of them--I can now say after over a month wearing next to nothing but heels that it actually may not be the best thing for your body. My feet are looking a little veiny-er than they used to, and my legs are in desperate need of a better stretching routine. Am I going to quit wearing them? You're kidding, right? But am I going to reward myself with a straight month of flats now that this is all said and done? Yeah, probably. Also, I have newfound respect for the Queen of the High Heel, my idol Stacy.
Admittedly, this wouldn't have been quite the problem that it was if it weren't for the shoe addiction that brought this on in the first place. Originally, I was supposed to be finished over three weeks ago, on May 28. But here's a fun fact: the average woman owns 19 pairs of shoes. (Yeah, I find that hard to believe, too.) This may or may not be (okay, it is) the same number of pairs that I managed to buy for myself in the approximately five months since the beginning of this project. Hi, my name is Laura, and I'm a shoeaholic.
Plus, most everything that I bought over this period was a high heel. Christy had no objections to my carrying on in my normal shoe-buying habits--which at this point consists mostly of increasingly outrageous heels, because let's face it, you've got to dig pretty deep in DSW to find a pair I don't have something similar to already--but going out and buying shoes to suit a particular purpose after exhausting all current resources was deemed a no-no, after I complained that none of the outfits I had packed for our trip to Texas matched my existing rainboots and mentioned that I was considering buying a more versatile pair before the trip (it was supposed to rain the whole time, but fortunately it did not). I should have just not mentioned it to her and gone on and done it. But in any case, this rule meant that buying myself new flats just for the sake of giving my feet a break was out of the question. So onward and upward went my high heel collection.
All in all, though, this did turn out to be a good experience. Five-plus months and 165 pairs of shoes later (for those of you who didn't do the math), I can now say, this was a good idea. I got to wear every pair of shoes I own, weeding out some, and for others, reminding myself how much I loved them in the first place. And Christy will never again be able to complain that I own shoes I have never worn (there actually were a few that I've owned for years and either never worn or worn about once). And as much as it does always pain me to part with anything, I realize that the shoes I'm giving away will find another good home (Maybe with Christy? You know I always feel better about the stuff you take!), and the 140-something pairs I'm left with won't be quite so crammed into their current home, of my little brother's conquered closet. At least for a little while.
