Karmen Wiid

When I was eight years old, my parents dropped me off at big kid school for the first time. My fingers fidgeted at the hem of my dress. Two tight braids pulled my scalp smooth, each tied off with a too-blue scrunchie. From a distance, I looked like the poster child for well-behaved girlhood. But take a step closer, and you’d spot two dirty, bare feet planted at the end of a pair of knobbly knees.

See, I grew up in rural South Africa attending a dusty farm school where shoes were not worn. Not to school, not to the shop, not even to church unless someone made a fuss. I ran barefoot across gravel roads and sun-drenched beaches, across the winter-cooled tiles of our kitchen and through the thorny grass fields behind our house. I don’t remember when the soles of my feet stopped being soft, only that one day they weren’t anymore. They’d thickened, without my noticing, toughened by hours of play and feral freedom.

After school, I’d rip off my stiff pencil skirt and replace it with khaki shorts. The white button down shirt usually stayed on though, stained at the end of the day with peanut butter and dirt. 

I didn’t know it at the time, but those barefoot years taught me something I’d carry with me long after I left that little town: a resistance to the unnecessary. A refusal to dress things up when they didn’t need to be. A subtle pride in touching the world directly.

At twenty-three, I found myself deep in what some might call a “self-discovery phase”, drifting through South and Central America with a backpack, a notebook, and one very sad pair of knockoff Birkenstocks.

By the time I got to the jungles of southern Costa Rica, the shoes gave out completely. Split soles, a broken buckle, unfixable. I probably could’ve replaced them, but at the time I thought my dwindling funds were better spent on avocados and wine. So, I didn’t.

I spent the next four months barefoot.

Bus stations. Jungle hikes. City sidewalks. Beach cafés. Riding motorcycles. I just stopped wearing shoes. I stopped worrying about it.

Which is how, a year later, I ended up on a rooftop in Hanoi at 4 a.m., three new friends gathered around me, half-drunk and utterly fascinated, poking and prodding at the soles of my feet like archaeologists uncovering some wild and weathered artifact.

They were amazed. Horrified. Impressed. A little grossed out.

And even though I’ve since replaced that sad little pair of sandals with an even sadder impersonation of the real thing, the habit stuck. I still kick my shoes off when I dance. I still walk home from clubs with cigarette butts and spilled beer clinging to my feet. Still wander the back streets of cities I don’t know with sandals dangling from my fingers. 

I know some people think it’s dirty or strange. But to me, it feels like a homecoming. Or at least, a home that I carry with me. 

I read somewhere once that the soles of your feet are connected to every nerve in your body. That to walk barefoot is to awaken something ancient inside you. Maybe that’s why I keep doing it. Why I keep needing to feel the world under me, raw and unfiltered.

My feet have grown hard over time, calloused by continents, toughened by cobblestones and the worn strength of having nowhere to be but exactly here. Now. 

For me, they’re proof that I didn’t shield myself. I let the world in. I let it press itself into me, splinter by splinter, stone by stone. 

Because the thing about bare feet is they learn.

The rocks hurt less over time. The thorns don’t go in as deep. The scorching sand’s bite softens. And suddenly, the world no longer feels like something to be walked over but something to be walked with. Each step a strange, exhilarating conversation.

And slowly, almost without noticing, you become someone who can carry yourself through most things.

So maybe it’s not really about the shoes. Maybe it’s about refusing to cushion yourself from the weight and wonder of being alive.

I’d like to think that the hard soles of my feet are just proof that I didn’t flinch.

That I didn’t tiptoe through this life.

I ran.

I stumbled.

I stayed.

I got back up.

I’ve never tread lightly. 

And when the night stretches long and strangers bend down to trace the maps carved into my heels, I let them. Let them see the places I’ve been. Let them run their fingers across the old wounds and healed blisters.

These feet have taken me home, even when I didn’t know where that was.

I carry it all.

Skin, scar, soil, story.

Barefoot, always.

At the edge of the next great undoing.