Down! Heel!

I only noticed that one of the boots had lost its heel tip after I took this photo. It's off to the cobbler for me!

Some people refer to their feet (rather tongue-in-cheek, I hope!) as their "dogs," so it's quite appropriate that I've decided to apply some commonly used dog commands to my shoes.

Steady... Steady...

"Heel! Down!"

I am, rather tongue-in-cheek, of course, telling my heels to get down, because I've had it up to here with the ridiculous levels of elevation.

I have not always been such a disciplinarian with my shoes. Quite the opposite, in fact! Since high school (hehe), I've associated height with style, so whenever I could get away with it, I was wearing the tallest platforms I could find. My first fashion post ever featured a chunky mary jane with what had to have been a 5-inch heel. I wore those shoes to work. At a grocery store. Where I was standing and walking around all day. How I ever survived such an ordeal, I don't recall, but my unwillingness to do so nowadays is the reason for this post.

For many years, I felt like heels were literally and figuratively the height of fashion, and higher equaled better. I invested in them heavily, even casting aside my preference for chunky heels and experimenting with stilettos. By 2015, I would say that 90 percent of my shoe collection had heels over four inches.

And then something changed. I began to realize that woman can't live on heels alone, and that if I wanted my feet to survive into old age, I would have to give them a break once in a while. Well, I gave them a break, all right—I fell out of bed that December, fracturing a toe, and inspiring the purchase of a flotilla of flats.

By the middle of 2016, I had implemented my shoe-height rules, which state that at least 2 days out of every work week, I have to wear low-heeled or flat shoes. I originally defined low-heels as 2 inches or less, but those are actually quite hard to find, so I relaxed the rule to allow for up to 3 inches.

By the end of 2016, I had noticed that low block heels were a legitimately fashionable footwear option, which really ramped up my desire to wear them more and painful stilettos less!

I can't say for sure that it's just the increased availability of low heels, or my own aesthetic preferences changing, or my internalized desire to inflict less damage on my feet, but over the past two years, I have found that I not only require myself to wear low-heeled shoes, but I actually prefer to wear them. I've come to realize that they're not any less cute than high-heeled shoes—in fact, they're cuter than high-heeled shoes! When I wore my towering stilettos, one of my coworkers always used to stare at them and yell, "Sexy shoes!" which was never really my goal. I want to look pretty, but sexy is taking it a little too far, especially for the office. I find that low-heeled shoes fit better with my image of myself. And they're also so much more comfortable!

So I've been, over the past year, replacing many of my insanely high shoes with more sensible ones. Remember the red pumps that I wore on the Thursday of my week of pants last spring? I think that's the first and last time I wore them. I always felt they were better suited for a Halloween costume than everyday use, so in December I replaced them with some cute comfort pumps with a 2-inch heel.


Remember the blue boots that I wore with everything since I resized them in 2013? I also replaced them in December, with some slightly darker boots made out of real suede, with a 3-inch wedge. So comfy to walk in, and much higher quality!

Once upon a time, I categorically shunned all kinds of flat boots (by which I mean boots with no heel, or with a tiny wafer heel) as I associated them with Uggs and found them too hideous for words. But over the past year, I've acquired 3 pairs, flat as pancakes all, that I actually adore (pictured at top of the post)! One of those pairs is replacing a pair of 4-inch heeled boots that I retired this year.

I probably will never completely purge my closet of skyscraper heels, but I'm slowly but surely reducing my shoe collection's average height by almost 3 inches, and I'm actually pretty pumped about it (pun totally intended)!