Observant viewers may have noticed that I've never shown my feet in these pages. Where to start trying to explain this secrecy about my feet? Well, apart from the lack of beauty in feet (they're right up there with ears, nostrils and penises, in my book), I have to go all the way back to childhood to fill out the explanation. I've always been very tall. But it wasn't until very early puberty that I started to shoot up in height and become excessively tall for my age. Not to mention skinny.

Kids don't like to stand out, and I was no different in that respect. But when my body wouldn't let me hide, I started gradually becoming extremely self-conscious about this physical thing my mind was dragging around.

(It would just kill me with embarrassment when my mom would take me clothes-shopping in the men's department. She'd say to almost every sales-assistant, "Eeeh, he's only twelve, you know!")

Kids can also be very cruel. That is .. other kids .. not me, of course :) My parents were only barely in the middle-class, and with four children, and house payments, they couldn't spend much money on clothes for us. So my trousers, shirts and sweaters were always too short, and, of course, I was made fun of for it. But the single worst thing was the size of my feet. They weren't actually out of proportion for my height, but since they're the only part of the body that noticably sticks out at a right angle, they're pretty obvious when they're big. I'd be walking to school, and evil schoolgirls would laugh at me from across the street, saying, "look at his feet!" To this day, if I hear a woman laugh on the street it grinds on me.

Fast forward twenty odd years, and here's the adult Keith, no longer skinny, in fact pretty nicely built, seemingly comfortable in his physicality. But I still can't find clothes to fit, and it still bugs me, and, at times, leaves me feeling inadequate and uncomfortable.

A few weeks ago, I was working out at my new (straight) gym. There was a hot new young guy who wanted to work in with me. Before I could get too excited, he started chatting up the tall, beautiful woman in her early forties working out on the adjacent machine. In between sets, I listened in on their conversation. I began to realize that the woman was an image consultant. I decided to leap at the opportunity, and once the cute guy had realized he wasn't scoring points with her, I spoke up, apologized for overhearing her conversation, and introduced myself. Her name was Marcie. She was a bright, cheerul, poised woman, a former international model, and after we'd chatted for a while, we exchanged email addresses so that we could arrange a time to talk more about the issues I'd explained to her; how hard (nay, impossible) it was for me to find clothes that fit nicely.

After a couple of phone conversations, and a meeting at my apartment (where she reviewed the contents of my closet), Marcie went off to do her "pre-shopping". And towards the end of last week, she took me out on two shopping expeditions, where I tried on all the clothes that she'd found for me. It was hard-going. Pants would be too narrow, or too short, or too baggy in the hips. Shirts would be floppy around the waist, and necks too loose. The same story as when I shop alone. But we persevered, and eventually came away with three pairs of pants, two pairs of shoes and a few casual shirts and sweaters. Even then, most of these had to be altered; but she knew a great tailor who could work wonders.

Buying the shoes was the hardest decision. For years, I've been wearing these big clunky Timberland boots. There's very little choice for me. There are quite a few large sizes available, but almost invariably in pretty horrible "old men's" styles which make me feel just as bad as I did when I was a little kid. Although the Timberlands are big and brutal, at least I feel "right" in them. Yet when I tried on these Kenneth Cole shoes at Nordstroms, and looked at myself in the mirror, for a very brief second I saw myself as somebody else would see me wearing those shoes, and I realized that it was a very different image than what the Timberlands project. I could see someone more sophisticated, more stylish, more modern.

That image didn't last more than a second, but I decided to buy two different pairs and just start wearing them. They aren't really me, as yet. But I think, over time, I'll come to like the new, more stylish me :)

I know that image isn't everything, and that I shouldn't care so much what other people think of my appearance. But I am what I am. I've lived so much of my life feeling uncomfortable in my own clothes. It's time to change that, and move on to feeling bad about other things than my appearance :)