407. Why Sparkly Shoes

[I wrote the following essay with my ninth graders during a month-long writing workshop, following exactly the same prompts and time limits I gave them.]

One day, when my daughters, now grown and flown women, were eight and eleven years old, I took them shopping at Justice. (I’m already going to put this story on pause to explain, in case you don’t already know, that Justice is a store for tween girls’ clothes and accessories. I’m not saying that boys and non-binary kids couldn’t shop there; I’m saying that the marketing is super-gendered, aimed at people who want to give girl (as the kids say). Justice’s clothes were mostly pink, glittery, rainbowed, unicorny, etc. And now back to my barely begun essay.)  When I found a pair of silver, sequin-bedazzled sneakers, I thought, “I would like to wear those.” Alas, stores for kids apparently don’t carry sizes for adult women’s feet. Sizist jerks!

Undeterred, when I got home, I went online looking for similar shoes and discovered that not only could I get sparkly shoes similar to those from Justice, but that I could get even better ones, improved by being pink. I bought and wore the heck out of those shoes, and everywhere I went, women stopped me to compliment my footwear. Once, when I was in a Target bathroom, a woman glancing under the stall (to sleep at night, I’ll tell myself she was checking to see if it was occupied because she needed someone to pass her some toilet paper) said how much she loved my shoes. Girls five and under like to compare their kicks with mine. What I discovered was that what I had on my feet brought bliss to those around me, both people I knew and those I didn’t. 

Flash forward. I had been sporting almost exclusively pink, sparkly footwear for several years when, unrelated to my feet, I was passing out a lot. In fact, I fainted three times in the week before things got so bad that I ended up hospitalized. (While the exact cause of my hospitalization isn’t the point of this essay, I know that if you’re like me, your curiosity will take over your brain, so feel free to read this other post or this one or look up GIST and learn about these fluke tumors.) After the surgery, I was contemplating my glittery pleasure-bringing shoes, and I thought, “Why not add more incandescence to the mix? If one clothing item (well, two, one for each foot) is good, lots would be better.” So I started adding to my daily glitter quotient. Eyeliner, backpack, and earrings followed the shoes. Then nail polish for fingers and toes. If there’s another place I can put glitter, I’m all ears…ears that probably have something sparkly hanging from the lobes as we speak.

Giving people little nuggets of unexpected pleasure reminds me of the opening of Annie Dillard’s essay “Seeing,” in which she talks about her childhood habit of hiding pennies and writing sidewalk chalk arrows to direct people to the coins. She liked that the first person to come along would get the penny, not because they “deserved” it, but because of luck. Joy, she implied, should be given out indiscriminately rather than specifically because we can’t judge who is worthy. Was it her childhood sense of justice making her think that way? Do people have to earn the right to pleasure? I don’t think so. I’d posit that every human deserves all good things. Hiding sparkles for only a few or giving them as directed gifts would defeat the purpose of radiating delight everywhere.

Which obviously brings me to disco balls, about which I have written before. The glee of the disco ball, for me, is in its physical capacity. An old adage tells us that if you break a mirror, you get seven years of bad luck, but instead, as I learned from a 2025 mom (Hi, EJ!), I posit that you can choose to pick up the pieces to make a disco ball because we make our own luck. Those sharp shards of broken glass and aluminum can slice our fingers open or can gather into a sphere that can refract mirth on everyone. We should all strive to become not the unlucky broken mirror, but the happy disco ball. 

The cool thing about noticing sparkles here and there is that seeing what’s not obvious is a virtuous cycle. Gay Talese has made a great career of seeing and writing about what other people miss. In his Gay Talese Reader, he catalogs lots of things in NYC that other people don’t notice -- cats and masseuses and mannequins and Biz Mackey and doormen and rain and the GW bridge and the Statue of Liberty and hawks. And seeing those things wouldn’t necessarily make everyone happy, but I think the whole point of his essay is that once a person starts looking, they will find plenty of things that make them happy. And if I know there are people out there searching to find what others overlook, then isn’t it a kindness I can do to manifest, much like child Annie Dillard did, nuggets for people to find that will beautify or improve their lives? I like that people don’t expect sparkles on a middle-aged woman; they’re often surprised by the incongruity of my wrinkled face, graying hair, and drab, fraying clothes with my effulgent footwear. 

So when you ask me, “Why Glitter?”, I’ll turn your questions back towards you: What do you mean? Are you asking how I became interested in glittery objects, why I adorn myself daily with sparkles, or what sparkles mean to me? Much of life seems to fall into Virginia Woolf's category of “moments of non-being.” She says that “when it is a bad day, the proportion of non-being is much larger”(70). I agree with her that often the times I value are the ones that shimmer. If I can cast a positive glow into the world, making moments of being for others and myself without any real effort, why would I not take the opportunity to do that? Why wouldn’t everyone?

Please share your responses in the comments.