On Dr. Martens and Disability
My cerebral palsy often turned footwear into a wedge issue
My love affair with Dr. Martens started while I was hunting for “cool” at a gigantic St. Louis mall. In an otherwise nondescript store, I spotted a pair of black Dr. Martens boots covered in flaky gold glitter. The sparkles weren’t baked into the material, but were instead glued all over the boots in tiny, puckered circles. Glam yet punk, sturdy but whimsical — these boots flipped a double middle finger at convention, and of course I had to have them.
My entire high school fashion aesthetic was best summed up as “alterna-teen” — a Daria-caliber pejorative once lobbed at me by a guy in my band class that nevertheless fit me to a T. To me, khaki was kryptonite. Instead, I preferred anything that looked different. I raided my parents’ closets for threadbare vintage clothes and old flannel shirts and wore oversized band T-shirts with jeans or corduroys. At other times, I rocked suburban-weird fashions, like fishnets with a knee-length black lace dress that made me look like a Stevie Nicks in training.
In other words, these glitter-spangled Dr. Martens were the ultimate weird-girl accent piece, something that would make me look wildly different from everybody else in my high school.
