It’s Saturday, must be time for a random confession. Here you go:
I love socks.
I like stripey socks and polka dotty socks and plain black socks. I like ankle socks and trouser socks. I like thin, plain socks and plushy, warm socks. About the only kind of socks I don’t like are woolen ones, because they give me hives.
But here’s the thing. For a long time, I didn’t think I deserved awesome socks.
I know! Weird, right?
It’s true, though. I thought that the only people who should wear cute socks were younger, thinner, prettier, and cooler than I. I was certain that I just didn’t measure up on the Deserving of Awesome Socks scale. I was also convinced that if I tried to wear fabulous socks, some person would come along and remind me that wearing them didn’t make me cool—I was just a wannabe. That, or what I liked in a sock was pretty much the textbook definition of pathetically uncool.
It shouldn’t come as any surprise that this was a message I heard over and over in my childhood. Not specifically about socks, but about pretty much anything I did for the fun of it. If I sported a shirt with a band logo, I wasn’t a “real” fan, I was just trying to make people think I liked that band as an “in” with their group. If I had clothes that other kids wore, I was just trying to make them think I was cooler than I was.
Even though I left that part of my childhood behind a long time ago, I still lived that way. I still lived with the fear that something about me wasn’t quite good enough.
And then one day I woke up.
And I bought some socks.
I bought a package of the absolute cutest stripey socks ever. They were black, with pink and cranberry-red stripes. They were soft, too, not like the cheap socks from Wal-Mart. They even matched my sweater perfectly. I think if I could have, I would have married them. They were perfect. (And did I mention cute?)
Guess what? When I wore them in public, no one told me that I should take them off. No one said that real adults don’t wear stripey socks. No one told me that I wasn’t cool enough to wear such cute socks. In fact, no one really commented on them at all.
That was the moment that I realized that life isn’t about doing things because we’re good enough to deserve them. I don’t mean that in the sense of “no one will ever be perfect, so don’t bother trying to be.” I mean in the sense that we don’t need to wait for some external accomplishment to do the things we love. We don’t have to wait to be thin or pretty or educated or spiritual or married or rich. We don’t have to leave our dreams and ambitions on hold until we’ve reached some milestone.
That’s a pretty profound thing my socks taught me.
I don’t have any idea what the future holds. But I know that I don’t have to tell it to wait until I’m somehow a better or different person. Bring it on, baby, ’cause I’m ready for whatever lies ahead.
I’ll be wearing my stripey socks.
