My Feet Really Hurt

My Feet Really Hurt

I have to laugh at her now, the woman standing in that ballroom in shoes that cost more than a mortgage payment, wearing a smile that had long since stopped asking her opinion. Why didn't she just take the shoes off? Why didn't she just say she didn't want to go? Why did she buy them in the first place, back when they looked like proof of something and not like four hours of standing on knives? I laugh because I know her so well now, better than she ever let herself be known, and I can see exactly what she was doing that night. She was not attending a party. She was auditioning for a life she had already been cast in.

My feet hurt from standing in shoes that were never built for standing, only for being seen. My heart hurt from spending an entire evening being useful to a room instead of true to myself. My head hurt from doing math all night, counting exits, counting minutes, counting how many more years I planned to keep doing this. And underneath all three, quieter than the rest because it had the most practice staying quiet, my soul hurt from a much older ache that had nothing to do with the shoes at all.

Here is what I didn't understand back then, standing in that room, being exactly what everyone else needed me to be. Nobody forced me into it. I was doing it because somewhere along the way I had decided that being needed was the same thing as being loved, and that a woman who could hold a room together with her composure and her posture and her painfully expensive shoes had earned her place in it. I didn't think I deserved comfort. I thought I deserved to be useful, and I mistook the two for each other for years.

I know I am not the only woman who has stood somewhere in silent agony, doing everything right, being everything needed, and calling the ache a small price for belonging. I think most of us have worn those shoes at least once, even if ours did not have a designer name stitched inside them. The ache was never really about the shoes. The shoes were just the part of the story anyone could actually see.

I am not the woman who measures her worth in what she can carry without complaint. I am the woman who finally understands that being needed and being loved were never the same sentence, and who takes the shoes off the moment she remembers that.