Less than half an hour into my day long Writer’s Retreat, I realized that the sole of my left shoe had detached itself from the toe almost to the heel.  I couldn’t walk without lifting my foot as if I was trudging through deep mud.

With some embarrassment, I took it off and walked, one shoe on and one shoe off, to the library desk and showed the staff my dilemma.  I asked if they had any glue.  They laughed and one woman assured me that they didn’t have any glue that would help me.  The reason she was so sure was that on her first day at work there, the same thing had happened to her, and the library glue failed to hold.

It turned out that, against library policy, one of the staff had an illicit glue gun.  Being friendly with the head librarian, I showed her my floppy-soled shoe and asked, hypothetically, if a glue gun could be found, would she object to it being used to repair my shoe.  She good-naturedly commented that she might even have one stashed away in her office.

A glue gun did appear, but it didn’t heat the glue enough to hold my shoe together either.  In the meantime, after much joking about “the things they don’t teach you in library school,” one of the staff went to her car and retrieved a roll of blue duct tape.

My first impulse was to drive home and get another pair of shoes.  I then decided not to take myself so seriously and made the decision to stay and use the day the way I had planned – thinking, reading and writing.

As I went through the day, no one, not one person seemed to notice that I had blue duct tape on my shoe!

In psychology, we call it the “Spot Light Effect,” when we live with the illusion that everybody notices every little imperfection of ours.  It is an illusion, because most people are so caught up in their own worlds that they rarely notice what is happening with other people.

You have to admit that my “imperfection” is pretty noticeable – a shoe covered with strips of shiny blue duct tape, yet no one did.  Or, if they did, they pretended not to notice so as to not embarrass me.

While I didn’t plan this little experiment, I offer it to you as evidence that we are much more aware of our perceived imperfections than the rest of the world ever will be.  Oh, and the librarian that first tried to help me, apologized profusely for laughing at my situation.  The saving grace was that I was able to laugh too!  It truly was a case of laughing with me, not at me.

So, here’s my invitation to you: The next time you become self-consciously aware of a perceived imperfection in your attire, tap into your humanness and be the first one to laugh.  It makes life so much easier!

The extent to which you accept my invitation is the extent to which you’ll be able to say, “I feel good about being me!” … and that’s a promise!