New Heights of Happiness

I have always said that everyone has a Guideposts story, even if they don’t all appear in the magazine.

Take the woman I’ll call Stella, who lived in my building. Stella and I occasionally returned home from work at the same time and rode the elevator together. Stella was tall, or at least she seemed so to me, a guy who argues with his doctor over whether I’m five feet seven and three quarter inches tall or five foot eight. Stella had a great smile, one of those smiles you wait all day to see. She dressed conservatively for her age, I thought, including her shoes.

Especially her shoes.

Ugly black flats. Shoes that said, Don’t look at my feet. And to accentuate the point, she always seemed to stand with her feet squished together and shoulders slightly stooped, as if to make herself smaller.

Arriving home one day, hearing the quick click of heels hurrying across the lobby as I entered the elevator, I held the elevator door and in rushed Stella—wearing shoes with heels that were the footwear equivalent of the Empire State Building. Now she was really tall.

She must have had some fancy event to attend, I figured.

A week or so later it happened again. This time I saw Stella striding off to work in a bright new pair of high-heeled shoes, very sharp, very fashionable. Very tall.

When it happened a third time, I couldn’t help myself; I had to say something.

“It looks like you’ve been on a shoe-buying binge,” I said.

Then came that smile and a laugh to match. “Thank you,” she said. “You know, I just got sick of pretending I was something I’m not. I love shoes. I used to troll the Internet, looking at all the incredible, beautiful shoes out there I would never wear. I knew all the brands, all the designers. I was like one of those people visiting exotic travel sites staring at photos on a computer screen of places they thought they would never actually visit, just dream about. Finally I thought, “Let’s be honest about this. I am who I am: a tall woman with big feet. Who am I kidding? I’m taller than most men, anyway; would it really matter if I did something I really wanted to do for myself and was just a little taller? Who cares? It’s not my problem!”

It certainly wasn’t, not any longer. Stella was tall and beautiful. You could literally see the physical manifestation of a whole new attitude in the way she carried herself, liberated from the futility of trying to be something she wasn’t. She moved out not long after to get married. I never met her fiancé. Maybe she found someone as tall as she was. But I like to think it was someone who simply didn’t mind how tall she was—someone, in fact, who found Stella as beautiful as Stella finally did.