High Heels: A Curse or Blessing?

They say fake it till you make it, but when you’re five feet tall, there’s only so much a shoe can do. Here, the emotional power—and price—of boosting your height

His name, Tanner Brooks, sounded like some southern rock band. He was the hottest boy I'd ever seen, one of two impossibly masculine guys in my hippie-dippy Shakespeare camp, in which I'd enrolled the summer after tenth grade to nerd out on iambic pentameter and dramatic irony. He had a low ponytail, long guitar fingers, and a different Grateful Dead T-shirt for every day of the week. I couldn't muster two words around him, but I wore an extra ponytail holder on my wrist in case his ever snapped; I imagined handing mine over just as his long brown hair began to fall in defenseless waves around his face. "No problem," I'd say with a shrug. This would lead to—what else—a kiss against a backstage costume rack. But the one day we were paired to perform a sonnet, I almost threw up. There I stood in rehearsal, preparing to hold Tanner's hands and look straight into his eyes, to hear him recite Shakespeare in all his feverish passion. Tanner grasped my sweaty palms.

"When in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes," he began, "I all alone beweep my outcast state." Sigh. "And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries...." Then he paused—had he forgotten the line? "Wow. You are so short," he said. In that instant, with my heart karate-chopping my chest, I remember feeling stunned, stunted; not just short, but altogether small. (Get thee to a nunnery, much?)

I stopped growing at around age 12. I hit 32B, five feet tall, and froze; and even though Tanner's poorly timed comment was anachronistically crude where Shakespeare would have been concerned—and painfully ironic considering he was delivering a poem about superficial things not mattering a lick, but anyway, whatever, I'm so over it—I wasn't exactly surprised. Could he have forced his way through 16 lines without mentioning how far down his neck had to strain to meet my gaze? Still, most people could barely get through "Nice to meet you" without pointing out that no, I was not tall. So I guess I was used to it. Besides, no one at my high school thought of me as short for very long. I was a ballbuster, a talk backer. Teachers gave me A's minutes before assigning me in-school suspension. (I almost got expelled once, but they couldn't prove I did it. And I'm certainly not admitting to it now.) I got the requisite high school flak for being little, for looking "like a turtle" underneath my overstuffed backpack, but who really cared, when "Hey, shorty" always came out sounding like a come-on and the muscly guys thought I was fun to twirl around?

College was different. I arrived at Northwestern prepared, like many freshmen, to seamlessly continue the hot streak I'd been on for the past four years. Getting into my dream school had felt like a triumph, but now there were even more exclusive clubs to get into, like the investigative journalism class that I didn't dare apply for because, clearly, I was the only one in my entire major who hadn't been editor of my high school paper. Or the sorority I stupidly joined simply because I got in. Becoming a part of that club gave me extra access to girls with identical handbags and famous last names, and the spoiled, loud frat boys who would lean down to yell "Huh?!" over the stereos at their keg parties. My classmates had summer internships lined up before I'd registered for winter classes. They could spend lecture periods doing crossword puzzles and still kick my ass on the final. All that trouble I'd run around getting into in high school? I'd always found it funny, but now it seemed aberrant and lame, lost time I could have spent crafting my 10-year plan. And, of course, the one guy I liked, a sophomore who lived down the hall, started dating one of the first friends I'd made in my dorm.

I didn't really resent my height, or at least I never had before. But I was wildly uncomfortable and in need of somewhere to place (misplace) all that insecurity. So my anxieties manifested themselves as contempt for the one thing I couldn't change. I felt my classmates were looking down on me, and in no time I turned the metaphor literal. Wow, she is so short, I heard them thinking. I am so short, I thought.

And so I began my exhausting and futile attempt to be taller. I bought clunky, wedged black boots for trudging across a snowy Chicago campus, and stack-heel varieties to wear to parties and bars. I had four-inch platform flip-flops; since it never got warm enough, I wore them in my apartment. God forbid I was ever seen barefoot.

I did anything I could to avoid having my feet on the ground. I wasted the free membership at the gym where I worked because the thought of my coworkers seeing me in sneakers terrified me. I'd answer the door in just a towel as long as I had my wedges on. When Brett, a 6'3" linebacker who'd spent part of the off-season delving into drunken woe-is-me diatribes before hitting on me at parties, showed up wasted and blubbering at 4 a.m. at my door...I peered through the peephole at his huge heaving chest and ran to put on my platforms. Would I have had the nerve to throw him out if I'd been in my stocking feet, the hems of my sweatpants pooling around my ankles? No.

I may have spent college hiding atop my shoes, but can you blame a girl for trying? There's something about high heels that makes change seem possible, and we've all felt their magic. Before we were allowed to wear them, and when the older, cooler people who did—mothers, teenage babysitters, pop stars—seemed older and cooler partly because of them, we projected infinite promise onto high-heeled shoes. What floor-length showstopper would we one day own to wear with them? And when we were standing there, tall and commanding, which Ken would sweep us off our elevated feet? How elegant and lithe would we look dancing with him, our twirling soles arched high above the floor, our shoes two glass slippers?

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