My toe hasn’t stopped hurting since I got this foot. It’s the big toe. On the right side. The one whose nail is twice the diameter of all the other toenails combined.
It’s a toe that’s gone through a lot. Last summer I dropped a beach chair on it and it came *this* close from falling off. The nail, not the toe.
The toe especially hurts when it has to interact with any shoes that are not sandals. And I’ve been stuffing my feet into some closed-toe, pointy-toe messes lately to prep myself for the auf wiedersehen of summer.
So right now, my toe is throbbing.
Should I see a podiatrist? Probably. But I also know that come a few months into boots season, the pain will go away. The toe will acclimate to its new environment. Were I to continue wearing boots all year round, the toe would probably never hurt again. But because I downgrade every summer to flip flops, the pain returns on Labor Day.
Last Thursday I talked about the moments in which we do not feel worthy and embellishments come up as a result. Those moments are uncomfortable; they nag at us, prompting us to feel like we do not want similar moments to be repeated.
But if I were to never go through the pain of stuffing my feet into loafers at the end of August, I’d be wearing sandals in the snow.
Pain is (often) temporary. But pain is necessary. Uncomfortable moments must happen in order to meet the moment and to grow.
I’ve often heard the argument that embellishment is only a sign of low self-worth, and that it must be eradicated by working on oneself to get to a place of high self-worth. But if all you focus on is eradicating the need to embellish you’ll remain in the exact same place you were when you started.
Embellishment is simply a sign that you’ve arrived at the next level. That you’re growing. That you’re propelling yourself forward. When that nagging feeling pops up in your brain, prompting you to say to yourself that you do not feel worthy and spew an embellishment out of your mouth, all it means is that you’ve put yourself in a situation where you have the opportunity to grow. If embellishment persists, sure, self-worth might need to come into play.
But as long as the embellishment goes away on its own, like a bruise on an angry toe, it just means you’re a human with the capability to evolve. And the capability to push yourself to the next level, in which you might embellish again, and it’ll still be okay.