Finding Love for my Under Appreciated, Undervalued Nemesis

Okay, so not to attract the feet weirdos, but I need to talk about feet for a minute. I’ve had kind of silly knee problems since I was in my early twenties. Shortest version of the story is that after I had an incident while working at a haunted house, my left knee has just never been the same since. Then around 24-25 years old, I had another bad experience with my left knee, one that kind of just cemented that it was going to be a “problem knee” for the foreseeable future. I did physical therapy after the first incident, and I got my knee checked out after the second incident, but in both cases, I waited until it was really bad, like beyond the point of “I should have done this months and/or years ago” bad.

A few years ago, I started having some minor hip and foot pain/general leg pain. After all the medical misadventures I have had, I’ve come to realize that most of the time, doctors don’t really know how to help if they can’t throw a pill or surgery at you and “fix the problem” — so I decided I should get ahead of all that pain or discomfort before doctors needed to throw pills or surgeries at me.

Matt has been on a foot journey for a long time. He’s been trying to make sure his feet are good for a while, so he had imparted some basic foot health knowledge to me over the years. I decided I’d try the shoes he’d like so much the Vibram Five Fingers. That was when we discovered the ridiculous fact: I cannot spread my toes to save my life. I could not get my foot in the shoe at all. It was such a bad experience that I stopped trying to explore that route.

Recently, my foot pain has been kind of unbearable. Nothing compared to when Matt’s plantar fasciitis issues come up, but I’ve seen him hobble around and thought, “Shit, I don’t want that for either one of us now or when we’re much older.”

So, I renewed my efforts to figuring out what I could do for my feet.

I found out that shoes are shaped like shoes and feet are shaped like feet, and because we cram our feet into shoes all day every day, our feet lose their foot shape and get shoe shaped, which accounts for bunions, curved in toes, and many other things—like the inability to spread my fucking toes.

My research led me to toe spacing correctors and wide toe box shoes. I was hesitant to take the plunge, but eventually, I found a corrective toe spacer on a really awesome sale so I got a good deal on one of those and then Matt found a pair of shoes he was interested in trying. He had so much good stuff to say after just a few weeks with them and I liked the way his looked so much that I decided to look at that brand as well. Within two weeks, I got those things ordered, and I’ve recently started using both.

After just one week with these changes, I can already feel a strangeness with my feet. I can feel muscles working that haven’t had to work in a long time, and I’m still only on the working up to longer usages on both. I’ve only worn the corrective toe spacer device a couple of times for ten-minute increments. (The site recommended working my way up to longer use.) And I’ve only taken my new shoes out for a couple of errand runs the last few days.

The shoes I went with are not only wide toe box shoes, but they are supposed to also be some kind of barefoot minimalist shoe, that allows the foot to rest in the space as it would if I wasn’t wearing a shoe.

Putting my foot in the shoe made me realize how squished all shoes before this had been for my feet. I was shocked. I’m already worried it will be hard to convince me to wear regular shoes ever again.

I posted about it in a few places online and found two people who made me feel really validated and excited in this journey. One person had made the change about a year ago, and he said it was a great decision. Another person said he made the switch about ten years ago, and his lower back pain cleared up. Both people were in different places in the journey of foot health, and I loved seeing how both were still excited such a decent amount of time apart in the journey. I am so excited to see how my experience and Matt’s goes with these changes.