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" His name, Tanner Brooks, sounded like some southern rock band. He was the hottest boy I&amp;#039;d ever seen, one of two impossibly masculine guys in my hippie-dippy Shakespeare camp, in which I&amp;#039;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&amp;#039;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. &amp;quot;No problem,&amp;quot; I&amp;#039;d say with a shrug. This would lead to\u2014what else\u2014a 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&amp;#039;s hands and look straight into his eyes, to hear him recite Shakespeare in all his feverish passion. Tanner grasped my sweaty palms. &amp;quot;When in disgrace with fortune and men&amp;#039;s eyes,&amp;quot; he began, &amp;quot;I all alone beweep my outcast state.&amp;quot; Sigh. &amp;quot;And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries....&amp;quot; Then he paused\u2014had he forgotten the line? &amp;quot;Wow. You are so short,&amp;quot; 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&amp;#039;s poorly timed comment was anachronistically crude where Shakespeare would have been concerned\u2014and painfully ironic considering he was delivering a poem about superficial things not mattering a lick, but anyway, whatever, I&amp;#039;m so over it\u2014I wasn&amp;#039;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 &amp;quot;Nice to meet you&amp;quot; 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&amp;#039;s minutes before assigning me in-school suspension. (I almost got expelled once, but they couldn&amp;#039;t prove I did it. And I&amp;#039;m certainly not admitting to it now.) I got the requisite high school flak for being little, for looking &amp;quot;like a turtle&amp;quot; underneath my overstuffed backpack, but who really cared, when &amp;quot;Hey, shorty&amp;quot; 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&amp;#039;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&amp;#039;t dare apply for because, clearly, I was the only one in my entire major who hadn&amp;#039;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 &amp;quot;Huh?!&amp;quot; over the stereos at their keg parties. My classmates had summer internships lined up before I&amp;#039;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&amp;#039;d run around getting into in high school? I&amp;#039;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&amp;#039;d made in my dorm.  I didn&amp;#039;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&amp;#039;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&amp;#039;d answer the door in just a towel as long as I had my wedges on. When Brett, a 6&amp;#039;3&amp;quot; linebacker who&amp;#039;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&amp;#039;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&amp;#039;s something about high heels that makes change seem possible, and we&amp;#039;ve all felt their magic. Before we were allowed to wear them, and when the older, cooler people who did\u2014mothers, teenage babysitters, pop stars\u2014seemed 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?  But I didn&amp;#039;t get swept away. High heels weren&amp;#039;t fantasy to me, and they weren&amp;#039;t sex, the way they can be, and often are. An amazing pair of shoes couldn&amp;#039;t liberate my confidence or inner vixen, because they were busy locking me in. I&amp;#039;ll never forget walking home from senior formal with my sensitive musician boyfriend, Evan, and his bandmates: My strappy stilettos had been killing me all night, and now, during the home stretch, I was sure my feet were irreparably mangled and would have to be amputated, and oh yes, someone would be sued. &amp;quot;Just take them off,&amp;quot; Evan finally said. And be free of the pain? And get to actually enjoy the rest of the walk on this one warm night next to this 5&amp;#039;8&amp;quot; boy I loved, and who loved me back, every inch of me? Only to be all the way down there on the ground, squat and armorless, and inevitably hear one of his friends\u2014all of whom had accepted me, finally\u2014exclaim, &amp;quot;Whoa, Rach. You&amp;#039;re that short?&amp;quot; Nah...I&amp;#039;m good. I think about that moment, and I feel so deeply sad. Not for my poor feet, which took two days to feel normal, or even for the stilettos\u2014and, I&amp;#039;ll be honest, if there were any shoes I would have liked to spare a negative association, it was those. But no; the profound melancholy is in realizing how ingrained my height issues had become, how much space they took up in the air on a perfect June night, when I should have felt so free. After college, I moved into a crappy apartment in Arlington, Virginia, bought a dumpy used car, and got a relatively demoralizing job making copies at an investment bank. And I was so happy. For those first few months, I knew only one person in the entire tristate area\u2014my roommate, Hili, a college friend\u2014and our lives were the kind of nothing-to-lose adventure that you never want to repeat but hope to always remember. Our first friends were the bartenders at the brewery around the corner; we&amp;#039;d drink all the free beers we could handle before stumbling home and collapsing in hysterics on the floor of our furnitureless living room with a gallon of ice cream. We shared late-night diner food with men who&amp;#039;d worked for Clinton; made friends with a cabbie who became our personal driver; crashed parties just to give out fake names and be new people for a night. Sometimes we&amp;#039;d drive around for hours\u2014we had hours to spare\u2014trying to find a Target or the Lincoln Memorial. We were always lost, but always sure we&amp;#039;d get there. I started being set up on blind friend-dates, where I brought the why-not attitude I&amp;#039;d cultivated in those months of flirting and freeloading and feeling magnificently anonymous, and I somehow made my way into the center of some warm and wonderful circles of friends. Outside of the upper-middle-class college bubble, all the heavy inferiority I&amp;#039;d been carrying started to lift, and I realized how reassuring the &amp;quot;real world&amp;quot; could feel when I had something authentic to offer it. Now the pretense effected by a couple inches of height seemed irrelevant, and a little pathetic. So I began to reacquaint myself with being five feet tall, having literally forgotten what it looked like, felt like, walking around down there. I had to train myself not to put on platforms just to check the mail. Only after two years of learning to re-embrace the flat shoe was I ready to rethink the heel.  And how. I moved to New York City to work at ELLE. Here I was, a girl from Atlanta who&amp;#039;d always seen fashion as beyond my purview, something relegated to the Sunday Styles sections that I&amp;#039;d steal from my parents&amp;#039; paper and stash under my bed. I&amp;#039;d always known how clothes and accessories could make me feel, but what, really, could fashion do for me? Everything, it turns out, that it never could have done when I wasn&amp;#039;t feeling good in my own skin. Beyond just their flair for effortlessly chic ensembles, the girls in the office are utterly, rabidly, till-death devoted to the high heel. They have their favorites, depending on the season\u2014fall 2008&amp;#039;s YSL Tribute platform pump, spring 2009&amp;#039;s Alexander Wang fringe peep-toe bootie\u2014and their perennial loves, Balenciaga and Louboutin. To them, shoes are modes of expression that provide daily doses of inspiration in a creative workplace. They perfectly encapsulate the most provocative elements of fashion: art, innovation, aspiration, alchemy. They can make you not just taller, but leaner and sexier. They swivel your gait, improve your posture, and make your clothes look better. Jodi, an accessories assistant, once told me, &amp;quot;I could be wearing my hottest outfit, and I&amp;#039;ll still feel like I&amp;#039;m in gym clothes until I step into a heel. Now I&amp;#039;m dressed.&amp;quot; Every day I watch these girls using their heels and the strut they provide not to obscure what&amp;#039;s wrong, but to channel their best selves. At the same time, they can sport a pair of Converse and perfect a swagger. I remain humbly inspired.  When I slip into a high heel now, I can feel the transformation. I see my outfit go from &amp;quot;blah&amp;quot; to &amp;quot;ta-da!&amp;quot; I sense my butt lifting and my hips slimming. I can feel the confidence in my shoulders and the sway in my steps. I notice the difference in how I&amp;#039;m perceived: This petite girl? She means business. But in knowing what high heels can do for me, I also understand what they can&amp;#039;t. And the moment I kick them off, I still feel just as tall. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.elle.com/beauty/health-fitness/advice/a9062/high-heels-a-curse-or-blessing-473354/>