Writing about the public rating of her feet on the celebrity foot database wikiFeet— who knew?!— Ziwe outlines other insecurities in the New Yorker. There are many, on a par with most of the people we know, quite a few from earlier in her life yet still etched on brain and heart. She describes the strange reality of social scrutiny and all the shit it puts in our heads and that we have to find ways to antidote. Which she does, in the last beautiful paragraph:
Yes, though I am ashamed to admit it, I still care what people think about my feet. I care what people think about me. But the best lesson I ever internalized is that no one will love me, or my feet, like I love myself (and my feet). I learned this from an episode of the Japanese anime series “Sailor Moon.” Loving myself is a tough task, and requires constantly reminding myself that I deserve patience and generosity and warmth (and compliments on my feet, which I should note are getting better by the day thanks to extreme procedures like chemical peels).
Everyone and everything we know will soon turn to dust, except plastic, which will take hundreds of years to biodegrade. In the meantime, so what if my feet do not measure up to Victoria Justice’s? They allow me the freedom to dance to Britney Spears with my friends.
It got us thinking about the pleasures and illumination our shamed parts provide. MY unkempt feet walk me all over town so I can look at wonderful things, through fields so I can feel the earth, in the surf to feel the cool sea.
We’re watching Sailor Moon, the anime series that inspired Ziwe’s epiphany (on Hulu and Netflix). We’ve also discovered that there is a blog called Anime Feet, devoted to just that.
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