How My Anger Collage Turned Into a Sweet Pair of Sandals

Ever since I re-joined the cult of The Artist’s Way I’ve been spending a lot of time doing insidious self-therapy disguised as silly creative tasks. This week, one of the tasks was to make an Anger Collage.

Step one: think of something you’re angry about

Step two: make a collage loosely based on this theme

Step three: write about it

Kind of thing.

I had an inexplicable hard time with this considering that the last task—Write Down 50 Things You’re Angry About, Super Fast—was unsettlingly easy.

(This chapter is about how anger might be blocking your inner artist, obvi.)

But maybe because I spent about ten hundred hours in front of my computer this week and am a mush-for-brain at this point, the Anger Collage was tough. I didn’t really get very far with it. Which was kind of disappointing, because I really do love to make collages.

You know what I did get far with? Ordering a pair of shoes off the Internet.

This might seem like, yawn, what every girl would do if she tried to flip through the Anthropologie catalog when bored on a Friday night, but ordering things off the internet isn’t really my style, and I pretty much never buy shoes. In fact, some of my girlfriends (and quite a few of my maybe-gay ex-boyfriends) have been mortified when they saw my shoe collection for the first time.

I currently own seven pairs of boots, one pair of hiking shoes, six pairs of flip flops, and one really awful pair of cheap TWT strappy shoes I bought at a mall somewhere like ten years ago. Those only come out for sudden wedding emergencies.

My entire collection of shoes. It’s sordid, I know.

Now, I know in a third world country this would be a hell of a lot of shoes to own, but in my girlie Western universe, it’s almost shamefully sparse. I can fit all of my shoes in a basket next to the door. (The basket-o-shoes was another thing one of my probably-gay ex-boyfriends wasn’t that keen on.)

I actually hate buying shoes, find it thoroughly stressful, can never find any I like, and when I do, change my mind almost immediately. So when I saw a pair of shoes that I loved unconditionally, I jumped on it.

I pushed aside my stack of bills, the unopened envelope from my CPA announcing my taxes owed, and my list of uncollected invoices, and discovered that it takes literally under a minute to order a pair of shoes from Anthropologie.com. Nice job, marketing execs and web developer geniuses. You got me.

DISCLAIMER: If you are one of my ex-boyfriends reading this right now, I swear I’m not talking about you. I’m talking about the illiterate one.