In the 1990s and 2000s, in the great metropolis of Te Papa-i-Oea (Palmerston North), all school kids went bare foot. More accurately, we arrived at school in shoes, kicked them off before entering the classroom, then didn't bother to put them back on.

As a kid, I had big feet for my age, wearing adult size 13s since about age 12. I was always self-conscious about this. Kids would point and stare, family took potshots about me having 'hooves'; so, I never took my shoes or socks off around others. This somewhat singled me out during morning tea, lunch time, and during P.E. classes.

One day when I was year 7, I was alone in my intermediate school classroom with a Year 8 who I looked up to (probably because he didn't bully me). He was sitting at the classr computer and I noticed he also had relatively big feet for his height. He wasn't self-conscious, I noticed. It seems like such a small moment but … why was I? I decided I was being silly and started going barefoot at school.

Being barefoot 24/7

Allowing myself to be barefoot was like a sort of body positivity-themed "coming out". Starting around 19 or 20, I ditched shoes forever and only occasionally have looked back. Wearing shoes again would be like going back into some kind of proverbial closet. A shoe closet?

At first, I would put my shoes in my backpack during the day at my courses at EIT in Ahuriri (Napier) and didn't bother to put them back on when I took the bus home. Eventually, I stopped taking them to EIT at all. I think I became a full-time barefooter in 2011. I even crossed the graduatiaon stage barefoot in 2012.

Moving to Te Whanganui-a-Tara (Wellington) made things a bit easier on my feet. The summer sun doesn't make the asphalt bake like it did in te Matau-a-Māui (Hawke's Bay) so I could enjoy the ground year-round. The wind and rain provided no barrier since I enjoy splashing in the puddles. My feet and this city are fairly well suited.

I did adopt footwear when I taught at my previous school up north; it was a uniform school so I wore sandals to work but kicked them off under the desk. However, as soon as I got to my current school, I had footwear for about a term, and then never again.

The online username feets

Going back a bit in time, I remember being 13 or 14 and going online for the first time. My first few usernames were based around my birth name. That's a fool's way to be online, so I have had quite a few other online nicknames.

One of my usernames conflicted with someone else's nickname on an IRC server, where no two people can share the same name, so I came up with feetyfeetz based on a nickname someone gave me due to my barefooting. Eventually, that shortened to feety, then years later someone on Discord called me feets, which I adopted.

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