Kia ora, I'm Feets!

I'm Māori, gay, nerdy, into tech (especially Apple), into games (especially Nintendo), and I'm a 100% barefooter. I live in beautiful Aotearoa New Zealand in the humble hamlet of Te Whanganui-a-Tara, or Wellington City (the nation's capital). I'm a high school teacher who teaches Digital Technologies, including Swift programming.

Nau mai haere mai ki tāku pae tukutuku!

I have a bunch of Apple stuff, including:

I also had an Apple Vision Pro with M2, but I've since sold it. I look forward to it being sold officially in New Zealand so that buying accessories isn't such a pain.

On the gaming side, I have:

My favourite franchises are Splatoon, Mario, Pokémon, and The Legend of Zelda. Very basic Nintendo fan.

Why the bare feet?

Buckle up.

For context: in all the schools I went to in Hawkes Bay and Palmerston North in the late 1990s and early 2000s, it was perfectly normal to be barefoot during the day at school. Shoes got kicked off in the corridors before class and put on a shoe rack. During morning tea and lunch time, kids would either put them back on or just play outside barefoot. I distinctly remember one kid whose soles always managed to turn black after morning tea, usually from playing kickball on the asphalt.

As a primary school kid (ages 5 to 10), I was teased for all sorts of reasons: being too smart, being too stuck-up due to being too smart, and really just not having any friends at all. I was targeted for having long, unkempt, messy hair because I hated the feeling of haircuts. I was targeted for saying rude things without meaning to do so. Oh, I was targeted for many things, much of which was perfectly under my control.

Amongst the things not under my control, and it might seem silly and minor, but I was also targeted for big feet for my age and height. I was already wearing adult size 13 shoes when I was 11 or 12. Of course, I think I've grown into them now, but I was always self-conscious about being barefoot around other kids. Even in my family, I'd sometimes get them compared to horse hooves. It was always in jest, but it meant I always kept my feet hidden inside black school shoes during the week.

While everybody else took off their sandals or shoes and socks, I kept my socks on. Nobody could see.

The body image issues started to dissipate in my time at intermediate school, in 2001. A Year 8 boy in my class, who was always comfortable being barefoot (although no more than anybody else), was kind to me when very few else were. We were working on a project together and, as a Year 7, I looked up to him. He was nice, chatted about the games he played, and laughed at my feeble attempts at humour. His carefree attitude rubbed off on me; I wasn't particularly highly-strung but I certainly acted like there was a stick up my arse. He and his friends never said anything mean to me, either.

I felt that, perhaps, I could be accepted for all sorts of ways, for being who I was. Amongst other changes in my behaviour at school, I started wearing roman sandals. This meant I had to be barefoot during class time, which was a step forward for getting over my complex. That said, I would mostly sit at my desk so nobody could see my feet. Even if I wasn't the target of bullying and mockery anymore, I felt they might still be.

Eventually, in my second year of intermediate school, somebody noticed my size 13 sandals sitting in the shoe rack and brought them into the class. "Whose are these?" they asked loudly. I sheepishly put my hand up and said they were mine. "Wow, that's cool!" they said, and a few others, as well. They were all very interested what it was like, wanted to compare the sizes of their feet with mine, and generally praised me. It must have only lasted a couple of minutes but it made me feel much better about myself, as though a defect had become a superpower — and eventually, became nothing at all.

High school uniform regulations shoved me back into black shoes. Yet, I felt the stigma had gone already.

Alright, so you could go barefoot in front of other people. So what?

Getting there! By around 2007, I was wearing shoes again, thanks to high school, but the complex had disappeared and I could happily be barefoot in front of others. I often wandered around my friends in my hometown of Wairoa barefoot for the day, but it was never a regular thing, particularly not during the summer when most paved surfaces were searing hot and most grassy areas were covered in prickles.

Fast-forward to around 2008-ish, I started study at the Eastern Institute of Technology in Taradale. I was doing my Diploma in ICT which involved a lot of time in a nice, air-conditioned building. I lived in Meannee, a suburb of Napier that was quite distance away, so the most efficient way to get schoolwork done was stay on campus. Finding an unused classroom during the day, stretching out in a wheelie chair, and getting down to some programming demanded some comforts. If shoes were slipped off under the desks, so be it. If nobody bothered to put them back on when wandering over to the cafeteria, so be it. If that 'nobody' was me, so be it!

A year and a half (or so) into my studies, I just stopped wearing shoes to campus altogether. Of course, you could get away with things like that in Hawkes Bay; it's a very relaxed town where pyjamas and a dressing gown at the supermarket might even be considered dressing up.

So, off the shoes went. Off they stayed. From that time, a full-time barefooter was born!

At the end of 2011, I moved to Wellington to study at Victoria University of Wellington. I decided to keep unshod, despite the colder rain and harsher winds. I got the odd look now and again, more so than in Hawkes Bay, but nothing I couldn't deal with; I even wore the odd looks with pride. I briefly wore footwear during my year teaching up in my hometown in 2017 and when I started at my current job in 2021. It didn't last long.

I've been a barefooter since 2011. I swore off shoes years ago.

The body image complex is gone, and I am happy.

Okay, so why the name 'Feets'?

One of my earliest online usernames when I was a teenager was feety, a little nod to my body image complex which I felt I could overcome online. I abandoned that name fairly soon after as it carried too many R18+ associations that made me the target of some rather unwanted attention.

Like many people who've been more-or-less raised by the internet, I've had a few usernames in my time but, eventually, I returned to that using feety for online gaming.

One day, one of the people with whom I semi-regularly played Splatoon 2 called me Feets, and it stuck. I eventually changed my online gaming identity to use that name, creating a Twitch called FeetsTV, following the common suffix TTV in Twitch usernames (but lacking one T, for aesthetics).

My streaming days are behind me, but my barefooting isn't, so I thought I'd merge my regularly online identify with this one. For all intents and purposes, I am now Feets.

Cool story, bruh. Still, you chose that as the gimmick for your online identity?

Meme of Marge Simpson saying "I just think they're neat". The image is edited to include "WHY THE BARE FEET ALL THE TIME?" at the top, and a foot emoji covering the usual potato that she is holding.