I love shoes. I’ve always loved shoes.

When I was a kid my mother told me that all women have to make a choice between a love for shoes, a love for clothes and a love for handbags. She made it quite clear, choose one love of your life, stick to it or be doomed to eating noodles and beans for the rest of your existence! And I made my choice right on the spot, I chose shoes.

Of course I’d given it some thought and my love for shoes was just the reasonable one. With clothes I would see my body go through changes with age – some I’d love and some I’d hate but they were all bound to happen (and they did). Handbags never stood a change because anything that requires to be carried around with me at all times just sounded like a little too much effort for the very minimal return of carrying around my stuff – also I was a kid so I had no stuff, so a handbag seemed a little pointless. Whatever my reasons were, I chose shoes and it has been all roses and bunions since then!

The older I got, once I sort of decided what kind of life I’d be living I sort of started seeing myself living my happily ever stiletto life! I wanted them all! Open toed, closed toed. Leather and suede. Funky colours and bland colours. I wanted them all. And for a minute there I thought I’d have them all, I thought I’d wear them all and I thought they’d step into a room and boldly pronounce to anyone who doubts it that I had arrived!

I remember how I beamed when I saw women in stilettos walking along the corridors while I was a student in my all stars. I’m pretty sure that each time I saw a black woman in a pair of high heeled shoes I’d instantly hear the “Girlfriends” theme song play in the background and it was glorious each time. It was almost angelic and spiritual each time, until December 2017.

By December 2017 I’d been working in my first “professional” job for a year. I’d sort of started to move towards a deeper self awareness that forced me to challenge all my decisions in an almost catastrophic manner. Catastrophic because I saw myself do an overhaul of who I was and what I thought was important – from my work, to my friends, to how I was perceived, to what was real and to, yes, my very weird relationship with all material things and what I thought they were telling the world about me.

I was nervous in December 2017. I was going to start work in a new environment the following January and I really feared about not fitting in and my likability. It’s funny now that I think about it – how I’ve always wanted to be liked because I grew being told I was unliked, unapproachable and one time I was told I was an acquired taste. The thing about being young is that it is definitely not cool being an acquired taste. Even the young kids who present this sort of hipster, nonchalant personality want to be liked. Literally everyone wants to be liked, it’s human nature – we are at our core social creatures and likability plays a big role in that whether we admit to it or not.

So, back to my shoes – I was standing in a shop, with friends and I was buying shoes to help me fit into this new environment that I was worried I wouldn’t fit into and I somehow ended up buying these blue, pointy (yup, with my flat feet, talk about ambitious) snake print shoes that I deep down knew I had about 1% chance of making it through the day with both them and my feet in one piece. Chancer!

In that moment as I paid for a third of those shoes (did I mention that I was lay buying the shoes?) I felt my gut give me a confused look and an angry nudge saying “This isn’t you! This isn’t us! Who are you doing this for?” Of course like any good people pleaser I proceeded with the transaction, went off on holiday and proceeded to forget about the shoes until my next monthly payment was due – well at least I tried. Then time came for the payment and nothing moved me towards the store. Then another month. Still nothing. Then came phone calls from the shop assistants telling me how I was going to lose my initial payment and still nothing. I think the fact that I had to lay buy the shoes should tell you that I am not the type of person in a financial position to be letting money go all willy-nilly but at this point I’d like to believe my real self was calling the shots and putting an end to the madness and because of that I never actually went and picked those shoes up.

What came after that was a lot of re-examining and trying to figure out what’s the big deal about shoes anyway? I mean you wear them, spend your whole day in them but are they the kind of thing that would improve ones likability? Like really? If I am honest I really thought they would. I thought that if I had the right kind of shoe that was bold enough, shiny enough or important enough it would go a long way in making myself endearing to all these new strangers whose opinions I valued way over my ability to walk in an upright position. And in all honesty none of it matters, none of it should matter and I wish that right at this moment I was 100% convinced that it doesn’t matter but I know to a certain extent it does.

We are seen or not seen purely based on how we look and most of it makes absolutely zero sense. The resulting emotions that come after this is that we justify who we are, why we are and why we should be seen based on things that make absolutely zero sense and to be honest I wanted to put an end to that in my own life. Actually “want” makes it seem like it’s a choice, what I mean to say is I had to put an end to the monkey chatter in my head that is constantly telling me what I need to acquire in order to be worthy of my place here on earth.

Don’t get me wrong, if you feel lovely and empowered and enjoy a good stiletto then this statement is in no way directed at you – this statement is directed at my former self. A self that clung onto things that never quite presented a true version of herself. That’s who this is for. It’s not an anti-consumerism post, nor is it a call for people to walk bare foot like back in the day before fire was invented. Nope, I am not advocating for anyone doing anything that goes against their true self. Honestly this isn’t even about shoes, or clothes or even handbags. This is purely about me; about me examining the weight I had been placing on things that aren’t even important to me. This is a post to myself, from myself, to remind myself that I am valuable and worthy as I am. This is me, standing in the mirror of the internet at 29 shouting as loudly as I can that: I AM ENOUGH, I BEEN ENOUGH AND I WILL STAY ENOUGH!

So I’m my journey towards never being in a situation again where I feel crappy for buying something I know I have no use for or a position where I am going against the core of me to make myself more likable; I have decided to chip away at the rubble that’s cluttered in my mind over my lifetime about what makes me worthy and sometimes, like today, that means walking past a pair of shoes People Pleaser Nthabi would have had to have and feeling absolutely nothing but relief that that craving is gone.