She bought red stilettos on a whim.
They were unapologetically red. Not wine. Not burgundy. Not the sort of red that could quietly pass for sensible.
Red.
And the heels were high enough to make a statement before she had even opened her mouth.
When they arrived, she opened the box with the cautious excitement of someone who had wanted something without quite admitting it to herself.
The red stilettos were beautiful.
She ran her fingers over them. Admired the curve of the heel. Slipped her feet into them and stood up.
Then she walked.
First to the mirror. Then across the room. Then back again.
She smiled.
There was something about wearing them. It felt good. Strange, too. And strangely familiar. Like an old memory she couldn’t quite place.
She walked around the house in those shoes for a while, listening to the unfamiliar click of her heels against the floor.
And then, slowly, the doubts arrived.
They weren’t really her, were they?
She wasn’t stylish enough. Where would she even wear them? What would people think? Perhaps they were a little too much. Perhaps she had been ridiculous to buy them.
And then came the thought that settled the matter.
She was too old for red stilettos.
She would return them. She was determined to. She put them back in the box.
A while later, she opened her wardrobe to get out her chequebook. And her eyes fell on the olive-green dress that had been tucked away for years. She pulled it out. She remembered buying it. She remembered loving it. She also remembered being told, “It isn’t you.”
Apparently, she had believed that.
She looked at the dress for a while. Then she noticed the wide-legged jeans hanging beside it. She had bought those too. She had loved them too. Until someone told her they were “out of fashion.”
There was a blouse she had thought was too dramatic.
A skirt she had bought because it made her feel wonderful, and then quietly pushed to the back of the wardrobe after someone had questioned the choice.
There they were. Little pieces of a woman she had repeatedly talked herself out of being.
The dress. The jeans. Even her hair.
Suddenly, the red stilettos didn’t seem like an isolated purchase. They seemed like part of a pattern.
How many times had she liked something and then asked someone else whether she was allowed to like it? How many times had she chosen the safer colour, the quieter dress, the more sensible shoe? How many times had an opinion, sometimes spoken, sometimes merely imagined, become more important than her own?
It was odd, she thought, how easily a person could become a spectator in her own life. She had spent years looking at herself through other people’s eyes. And perhaps that was why the red shoes felt strange.
Not because they didn’t belong to her.
Because they did. Too much.
She looked at the box sitting on the corner table. Then at the dress in the closet. Then back at the box. She opened the box and took out the red stilettos. She put them on.
Only now was she wearing red stilettos.
She walked to the wardrobe and pulled out the olive-green dress. She paired it with the wide-legged jeans she had been told were out of fashion. The red stilettos lifted the outfit. Her mood. And, somehow, her.
She added red lipstick.
Then she looked at herself in the mirror. And smiled. This felt like her. So much like the her she had forgotten.
The woman who had once bought clothes because she loved them, not because they had been approved by an invisible committee of other people’s opinions. The woman who had known what she liked before she began asking whether she was supposed to like it.
She stood there for a while, looking at herself. And something occurred to her.
Perhaps this was how change happened.
Not always with grand declarations. Not always with dramatic decisions or carefully drawn plans. Sometimes it began with something ridiculously small.
A pair of red stilettos.
A dress pulled out of the back of a wardrobe. A colour you had been told wasn’t for you. A choice made without asking anyone else what they thought. One small choice can create a domino effect.
You make one decision, and suddenly you find yourself making another. And another.
You open the wardrobe. You find the dress. You put it on. You add the shoes. You put on the lipstick. You walk a little differently. You look at yourself differently. And perhaps, before you even realise it, you have started moving in a direction you hadn’t planned to take.
Maybe that is the thing about choices. We think we are choosing an object, an outfit, a pair of shoes. Sometimes, we are choosing a direction.
The red stilettos didn’t change her.
They didn’t make her into someone she wasn’t. They simply gave her permission to notice the woman who had been there all along. And perhaps that was why they felt familiar. She hadn’t become someone new. She had remembered herself.
She looked down at the red stilettos.
Then she walked out of the room. Not towards the return box. Towards the door.
Sometimes, the way back to yourself begins with choosing the right heels to help you walk a new path.
