HOW I ‘KICKED’ MY ADDICTION

As a middle school kid, you’d always wanna be cool and up to date with the styles and trends your peers were rockin’ but when my family moved to Rochester, New York from Puerto Rico we were in no means a wealthy or middle class family. In fact we were on the lower end of that spectrum and though my mom hated it, we were on welfare and we did make the line a few times for that government cheese.

As we worked our way up and out of welfare, my mom and dad would wait months to get us haircuts and we could forget it if we wanted brand name things when it came time to buying clothes or sneakers, which only happened once a year before the school year and that was all through layaway anyways so we still had to wait what felt like forever for new things. By the time we got them out of layaway they were out of style.

One of the trips would always be to Payless Shoe Source where we would get our 1 pair of imitation NIKE’s and 1 pair of church hard bottom shoes. I hated pulling up to that store because to me that meant another year of us wearing BOBO’s(hood name for busted or imitation sneakers) and risk being the laughing stock at the middle school bus stop.

There were some years where my shoes would be falling apart because of the snow wearing the adhesive off the souls so by the time I got home from school I had my toes sticking out the front or heel poking out the back. I would fix that by applying crazy glue to the souls and pinching the sneakers between the ground and one of the legs of our bunk-bed so it would pinch it down and make it stick and ready to wear to school again the next morning.

The first time my mom got me a pair of sneakers that weren’t from Payless they were BK’s(British Knights) which were popular back then and these from the mall so I finally felt cool and proud to show them off, unlike the Bobo’s from before.

When I started working and making my own money I became obsessed with buying all the sneakers I couldn't afford as a kid and went a little crazy buying shoes left and right and at one point I owned 398 pair of shoes. Yes, 398 pair.

My obsession with buying shoes did not end until I took a trip with some friends to the Dominican Republic where one of my friends families lived in real 3rd world type poverty in wooden shacks with aluminum siding roofs and no running water, no electricity, no heat no a/c and I could go on with more but I think you get the point.

One of my friends Dominican cousins who was a local was gonna come out and party with us Americans for a night when I noticed we were all dressed nice with new shoes but the cousin had on some busted beat up holey sneakers. I asked him his size and he was the same as I was so I let him wear a pair of shoes I brought with me in my luggage. The whole night we were partying in the club, us Americans were busy trying to party and chat and party with the girls but when I looked over to my buddies cousin, he couldn’t take his eyes off the shoes i’d lent him so I walked over and asked him, “do you like those shoes”? He replied, “Yes, I like them a lot” so I told him, “They’re yours, you can keep them and he started to cry because nobody has ever given him anything like that before.

That touched me so much that when we came back to Orlando from the Dominican Republic trip I went into my closet and did some major spring cleaning by sending him 350 of the 394 pairs of shoes I had because I enjoyed the feeling I got from giving him those shoes way more than the feeling of buying them for myself.

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