I Used To Have A Weird Foot Thing
A Professional Helped Me Resolve It
I see now, entirely too late, that my headline may have been misleading. If you came here hoping to read about how feet rev my engine, sorry pal: the only weird thing that turns me on is when a lady I find attractive wants to have sex with me. Although I’d like to think that if I did have a foot fetish, I wouldn’t be ashamed of it. As far as fetishes go, the foot thing seems harmless and easy to indulge.
Over a decade ago while I was in college, a problem developed with my feet. On my sole and heel, small faults would open in the skin. These bothersome little interruptions drew my attention and I poked at them with my toenails until the protuberance was protuberant enough for me to pinch it between my thumb and forefinger. Then of course I had to pull on the flap to get rid of it.
Unfortunately, this was not the sort of satisfying removal like when you peel after a sunburn or rid yourself of an old blister. You see, a blister is a construction site, a bit of caution tape to keep you away while your cells renovate the area in preparation for future use. My foot cracks were no result of some renewal process happening for my benefit. I was dealing with, I believed, some sort of rot. There was no clear distinction between diseased and healthy tissue, no perforated line at which to neatly tear. Pulling at the sticky-outtie-bits dragged otherwise healthy skin along with it, and I would leave small bloody crevasses in my poor little tootsies.
I was pleased to find in the CVS foot care aisle a tube labelled “Extra Strength Heel Crack Repair Cream.” Lo! I was not the first person in history to experience this! I rubbed some on for a couple of days but the problem didn’t immediately resolve so I gave up and decided I would simply tolerate this phenomenon and seek medical attention if it worsened. I tolerated it for twelve years.
Some few months ago, I sent a cell phone video to my friend Brendon. It was a close up shot of my tummy jiggling. “Hahaha. Pedicure?” “You’re goddamn right,” I replied. I was indeed having my feet attended to by a kind woman in a nail salon while my massage chair clumsily kneaded my back. The tummy jiggling was caused by a harmonious combination of the vibrating chair and my ticklish convulsions.
“I’m sorry. My feet are pretty bad, huh?”
I wanted her to reply, “Oh no, I’ve seen much worse, you’re fine.” But she was much kinder than that. Kind enough to give me the uppercut to the chin that I desperately needed: “Yes, they are bad.”
“What should I do?”
“Moisturize.”
“With a special cream?”
“Just lotion.”
“Oh.”
And so a new habit was born. Every day when I got out of the shower, I rubbed Jergens on my feet before sheathing them in my socks. And for a few weeks nothing changed. But the pedicurist’s words bounced around my skull like a bee in a minivan. “Moisturize. Just lotion. Yes, they are bad.”
Most of the time, my feet are the furthest things from my mind (except for during certain stretches). But every day I got to know them a little better as I nourished their parched soles. And then one day I realized: there were no more protuberances. No dry patches. After twelve years suffering needlessly in the desert, my feet were soft and smooth.
I had been operating under the wrong belief that something complex was wrong with my feet, requiring a complex solution I didn’t have the time or energy for. In truth the solution was the simple addition of a small act of self care to my daily routine. I have long held fast to a foolish fantasy that life is some wonderful, painless, magical thing that will happen at some point once the bad stuff is out of the way. It is a lesson I’m sure I will continue to learn: a great deal of life is mindful maintenance.
Here are some feet I doodled while writing this.
