Remember the glory days of ankle boots? It was 2014. John Travolta had just recently mispronounced Idina Menzel’s name at the Oscars. Gwyneth Paltrow and Chris Martin were still together. Donald Trump was a twinkle in literally no one’s eye. Knee-high boot fatigue was sweeping the nation. What a time to be alive.

I spent a good chunk of that year hunting for the perfect pair of ankle boots and finally found them on Moda Operandi — a Tabitha Simmons black, quilted-leather duo. I bought them on super saleright before Christmas and wore them nonstop for months. They added an elusive dose of Cara Delevingne-on-her-way-to-a-bodega (or some other off-duty establishment) to every ensemble. I could walk for miles without getting blisters. It was footwear bliss.

Fast forward to 2017 and I can barely look at them. I feel like a newly pregnant woman who used to eat eggs every morning and now suddenly HATES EGGS to the extent that she can’t even smell them. Okay, maybe that’s a little dramatic, but seriously, whenever I pick my formerly favorite black pair off my shoe rack and attempt to insert them into an outfit, it’s like trying to extract juice from half a grapefruit that’s already been squeezed to a pulp. Their magic is gone! Poof. Snuffed out. I’m pretty sure I’m not alone in feeling this way — all you have to do is click through a street-style slideshow from the past season to notice an acute dearth of ankle boots in comparison to previous years.

After experiencing this aversion for the past few months, I was ready to declare ankle boots dead— in fact, that’s the story I originally pitched. But when I started scanning the Internet with the intention of unearthing a viable replacement, my findings produced an unexpected revelation. Ankle boots aren’t dead, they’re simply in the midst of an identity crisis. Silly me! I should have guessed. Style is rarely stagnant, after all — it comes in waves, it mutates, it re-articulates itself again and again — and that’s exactly what’s happening with ankle boots.