Senior Year Shoes
Over the summer of my junior year prior to my senior year of high school I wrote a few articles to be able to afford new shoes for the year. The thing is I was only able to save something like $20 because I was getting paid 1 cent per word and wasn't fully adept of churning them out.
Given the limited budget it makes sense that my mother should have taken me to a thrift store, but instead I checked on eBay. Senior year and really all of high school what you wear affects how people see you, and this is the time in your life when you really care what everyone thinks of you, so I wanted shoes that were decent looking.
After searching through eBay I found some Sperry's that were size 11 and a fraction of the cost that they would be in store, and so I ordered them. The only problem was the Sperry's were the only shoes I could find in my price range and the problem I was a size 10 so I had to hope that when they arrived they fit me, but they didn't. They were a size too big which greatly impacted my ability to walk. There was a slump and indention in the shoe where my toes ended and the shoe had too much space which I had to deal with for 10 months. For 10 months I walked around the campus in shoes that didn't come close to fitting me all because my parents couldn't provide for us and I had to work with what I could still being a teen and in high school. It was miserable having your shoes shift walking miles a day from campus to campus and home.
Aside from my shoes not fitting, I also wanted a watch so that I could keep track of how much time I had to suffer in each class. Even with a watch I would check the clock every five minutes to see when I could leave. The watch though I saved up $30 for a Casio on eBay. The problem with this was the watch didn't fit at all, it could go up to my elbow and close on my bicep, so I went with my friend Raji to Walmart to have it adjusted but I desired so much to have the watch that when she took out a few links I told her it was perfect when really it was only decently fit. The result from this was I went 10 months walking around with a watch that shifted from halfway up my forearm to stopped at the wrist by bone. All day I would have to adjust it and I'm sure that was a mark of other kids seeing I was in poverty, but I worked hard for that watch and kept it because it was one of the first purchases I made for myself that was absolutely necessary.
So my senior year of high school I had to wear all of the clothes from the previous year with two or three new shirts, and the same pants I didn't get any new ones, I was wearing the same pants I had in 8th grade. My shoes didn't fit, and neither did my watch, and I had to use the same tennis racquet I bought my Freshman year. These little things that could have been fixed would have made my daily suffering in high school just that less tortuous.