Mismatched Socks

 

I wear mismatched socks. On purpose.

Because of health reasons, I wear compression socks all the time. And they come in packs of like 6 pair in various colors, and half are grey. So when I do laundry, I dump all the socks into one pile, I don't match them, and I pull out one color and one grey to wear each day. So my socks are always deliberately mismatched.

But why?

First, I'm lazy. I don't want to match up socks during laundry-time. 

Second, I know there's a landmine there for me mentally. Some of the colors are very similar, and it's easy to mismatch them when I don't intend to. So I'd be setting myself up to be irritated later in the week when I put on socks then, later in the day, realize they don't match.

And practically, if one sock gets worn or damaged or lost, it's just the one, and I don't have to throw out its mate.

Then, it's an easy way to just set myself up for a little bit of fun in my life. When I catch sight of my socks, there a tiny internal giggle at the silliness. If I have to wear health-conscious socks, they're at least going to be fun ones.

And finally, it's a way to check people around me on their tolerance and irritate them if they fail the check.

The socks I wear should not make any difference at all to anyone who is not me, right? But I have found that certain people expect my socks to match, and are quite irritated if they don't. Sometimes enough to say something to me about it. As it turns out, these are the same people that get easily irritated at me for not conforming to other expectations they have about me - and there are a lot of expectations I have no intention of conforming to. I WANT to irritate these people. Because there's no reason why I should have to conform to their expectations to make them comfortable. In fact, I enjoy making them slightly uncomfortable in harmless ways. This will make some of them grow, and others just get mad. Both are productive, and neither cost me anything.

At my PT facility, there is a person (not my PT) who comments on my mismatched socks every time as she walks by my table. "Hey, your socks don't match," she says. Now, obviously, I know my socks don't match. But that's not the point. What she's really saying is, "I note your deviation from the norm," or even "I'm uncomfortable with the choices you make; I would never do that." Because we are taught to be uncomfortable with people who don't follow our societal norms. That's how the norms work - everyone is expected to comply, whether they make sense or not, and we put pressure on those who don't to 'shape up', starting by just pointing out that they aren't following the rules. So what she's saying is, "you're weird and it makes me uncomfortable."

Now, the fact that she feels the need to comment on my socks every week doesn't make her a bad person. But it does tell me that she's a person who clings to the rules of how everyone is supposed to look and supposed to act. And that tells me that she's not a safe person for me to be myself with. She doesn't have the mindset that's going to make it easy for her to support my weirdnesses, my differences. I'm betting she's very uncomfortable with the fact that my shirt is off and my top-surgery scars are visible, too. But that's not something that's okay to point out, so she focuses on my socks, instead.

It works in the reverse, too. Sometimes people notice my socks and come up to say, "I love your mismatched socks; that's fun!" And they are usually people who then follow up with noticing and commenting on my tattoos or something else weird about me. Not because it makes them uncomfortable, but because they enjoy it. And most of the time, there's something about their choices that is visibly weird, or outside the norms, too. So I get to compliment them back. And now we both know that we are each other's people.