Corp Armor

Ten months into retirement and I still can't donate the heels

I needed shoes for a wedding. I opened the closet, looked down, and laughed.

Seven pairs of heels on the carpet, all of them facing forward like they were still waiting to go somewhere. Lauren. Bandolino. Ellen Tracy. The lime green slingback I have never once regretted buying. And in the front row, three pairs that went everywhere with me — the ones with the worn soles, the scuffed toes, the insoles shaped to my feet.

I took a photo and posted it to Threads with a caption about not being sure who I was saving them for.

Over eight thousand people stopped scrolling.

I wasn’t expecting that. I also wasn’t expecting the most common response to be: you need to donate them.

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There’s a thing that happens when you walk into a room in heels.

Not magic. Not transformation. Something more practical than that. You stand a little differently. You take up slightly more space. And the women across the room who are also in heels — they clock it. That’s the signal. She’s one of us. Not better. Not worse. Just: I see you, I know what your morning looked like, I know what you’re juggling.

Someone in the Threads comments called it “corp armor.” That’s close. But armor implies you’re protecting yourself from something. This was more like a uniform. A way of saying, without saying it: I do this and this and this, and I still showed up looking like I have it together.

I wore those shoes to presentations. To cocktail receptions where I made small talk with executives and a CEO. To back-to-school night, walking the halls for meet-the-teacher, sliding into a PTA meeting still in my work clothes.

And in those moments, the other women who showed up the same way — you found each other. Not explicitly. You just gravitated toward the ones who looked like they’d also come straight from somewhere else. Because work-life balance is a joke, and you wanted your people to know you knew that too.

The heels weren’t about vanity. They were about belonging to the right room.

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When I retired, I did what you’re supposed to do. I purged. Three large garbage bags out the door — suits, blazers, blouses still in dry-cleaning plastic. Things with the tags still on. I bought them for a life I was too busy living to actually wear.

That part was easy. The suits were a different era. Even if I walked back into an office tomorrow, I wouldn’t walk back in wearing those.

But some of the shoes I kept.

When the Threads comments started telling me to donate them, I felt the flicker of guilt. Like I was being selfish. Like I hadn’t been generous enough with my own closet. And then I thought about those three garbage bags and I wanted to send everyone a picture of them.

If only I had taken one.

Nobody asked about the bags. They just saw the shoes.

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Those three pairs in the front row. I know exactly how they feel on my feet.

Not in an abstract way — in the specific way that comes from wearing something to the places that mattered. The presentations where I had to be the most prepared person in the room. The reception where I told a CEO a story about accidentally arriving in a stretch limo and made him laugh. The long trips where we all sat on the flight home too exhausted to speak, trying to look like we were reading the Wall Street Journal and failing.

Those shoes were there. They know things.

After I posted the follow-up note saying I was definitely donating them — meant to be funny, written in the warmth of all those comments — I went back to the closet and looked at them again.

The others can go. The super high ones I never quite mastered anyway. The ones I bought hopefully and wore twice.

But the three in the front? They may still have some life left in them.

I bought them and earned them. I know how they feel on my feet. And I’m not ready to decide that the woman who wore them is entirely past tense.

Maybe that’s what I was really saving them for.

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You already gave away three bags. What you kept, you earned.

What’s still in your closet that you’re not ready to let go of — and what is it actually holding?

If this landed somewhere true for you — share it with a woman who needs to read it. And come back next Monday. We’re just getting started. 🌿

If this one got you, these are in the same drawer: