Why Feets?

In my childhood, in the great metropolis of Te Papa-i-Oea (Palmerston North), all the school kids were bare foot. We arrived at school in shoes, kicked them off to go into the classroom, then didn't bother to put them back on.

As a kid, I had big feet for my age (I was wearing adult size 13s at age 12). I was always self-conscious about this — kids would point and stare, even family would make light of them in jokes that I supposedly laughed with (but never did) — so I never took my shoes or socks off around others.

That somewhat singled me out during morning tea, lunch time, and during P.E. classes. It may have just been the prevailing culture of my primary and intermediate schools in the late 1990s and 2000s but barefoot was the default.

One day, I, a Year 7, was alone in my intermediate school classroom with a Year 8 who I looked up to (probably because he didn't bully me). He was sitting at the classr computer and I noticed he also had relatively big feet for his height. He wasn't self-conscious, so why was I? I decided "to heck with this" and started going barefoot.

Being barefoot 24/7

It seems like such an insignificant story but overcoming that was pretty big. Well, it was for me, anyway. Being barefoot was like "coming out" but for … body positivity, I suppose?

It's why, starting around 19 or 20, I ditched shoes forever and only occasionally have looked back. Wearing shoes again would be like going back into some kind of proverbial closet. A shoe closet?

It started with putting my shoes in my backpack during the day at my courses at EIT in Ahuriri (Napier). Then, not bothering to wear them to the bus stop to begin with. Eventually, I just didn't put anything back on unless it was a formal occasion on the pavement was too hot in the Hawkes Bay sun.

Moving to Te Whanganui-a-Tara (Wellington) made things a bit easier. It's rarely too hot, I enjoy splashing in the puddles when it rains, and the paving is mostly flat and feels nice underfoot.

I did adopt footwear at my previous school where I taught back up north. It's a uniform school so I wore footwear to work but kicked it off under the desk (then occasionally didn't bother to put it back on). However, as soon as I got to my current school, I had footwear for about a term, and then never again.

The online username feets

Going back a bit in time, I remember being 13 or 14 and going online for the first time. What username to call myself? Well, my birth name is Jaesan, so I went with jasey to start with as a diminutive.

My username clashed with somebody else on an IRC server (remember them? Of course you don't) so I switched to feety, a nickname bestowed upon me by someone I knew in real life. Eventually, someone years later started calling me just feets and that stuck.

TL;DR