I still have every pair of pointe shoes I ever had. I also have a fairly large painting with 6 pairs of them in rainbow colours. I had this idea for a long time that I would figure out how to DIY dye my old shoes to match the painting. I never will. There's no real practical value to keeping them. I'm not really fit to use them anymore without possible injury. All of them are in worse shape than they should have been before I replaced them. I'm not sure there's anything to do with them but shove them in a new closet. It might make more sense to keep one representative pair, if anything. So why is it hard to just throw them out?
I mostly didn't like doing ballet. I think it's by far the longest thing I've ever stuck with that I didn't really like. I'm kind of proud that I did and then also that I moved on to adjacent things. Seeing the shoes might take me back to what it was like more than old pictures, or even old videos. Being able to see and remember the consequences of always half-assing sewing the elastic is sort of a life lesson. If I just google pointe shoes, I don't get to see the inner layers that I managed to break into on a couple of pairs. They remind me of the hope and pride I had when I was deemed strong enough to wear them. They remind me of being a young person trying to navigate a really gendered environment. They remind me of 3-4 classes a week, of snacks and games on recital days, of the time I sprained my ankle and the teacher didn't believe it was that bad, and of years of awkwardness and toe pain.
