Making Peace with Being Tall

When you’re a girl who’s 5’11”, people usually have one reaction when they meet you: “Whoa, you’re tall.” It often comes before hello, and is usually followed up with, “Do you play basketball?”

Sometimes, they’ll ask if you model, which feels a little less carnival freakshow-ish, since it implies that the person may think you’re pretty — in addition to being remarkably tall.

Throughout middle and high school, I had a love-hate relationship with my height. On the one hand, I liked being different; on the other, I hated standing out for something that made me feel so unfeminine, brutish and awkward.

I can hardly remember a single episode of The Real World, but one scene stands out: When two girls, sitting on the kitchen floor, talked about how “being small was the best feeling in the world.” Even though part of me rolled my eyes at these women, their words hit me, because they spoke to something I had subsconsciously started to believe: Being an attractive woman meant being small, dainty, and delicate. Snow White, Cinderella, and just about every female character I’d read about in books talked about being small, especially in regards to any love interest they had. It was written in a sort of breathy awe, like the female character just couldn’t believe how bitsy she felt compared to this mighty protector she had fallen for.

Recently, Cosmopolitan ran an essay, “Big-Girl Syndrome,” about this exact issue. Interestingly, though, I found the author and I shared very similar experiences, yet had completely different reactions: She felt immune to society’s pressures to be a tiny wisp of a woman, and found that because people didn’t know what to make of a taller-than-average girl, she grew up to become bold and outspoken, unafraid to say what’s on her mind or fight for what she wants, much like a man would. She listed Game of Thrones‘ Brienne of Tarth as her hero.

I, meanwhile, saw Brienne of Tarth and cringed at first. She represented everything I fought not to be: She was a big, manly, commanding presence. She’s a strong character who’s not pigeonholed into classic “female” roles, but at first, all I could see was her asexual brutishness. That mannish quality was something I feared and fought against for most of my middle and high school years, especially as guys whose wannabe Freddie Prinze Jr.-coifs barely reached my shoulders mocked my ‘gigantic’ height or ‘monster’ feet.

While the Cosmo writer embraced her height and became bold, I shrank. I became obsessed with never inconveniencing anyone; in school photos, I’d always been ushered to the very back, behind most of the boys, and I became hyper-aware of my height potentially blocking people’s vision. To this day, at concerts, I am constantly worried I’m ruining someone’s view, so I will stand off to the side or kickstand out one leg, widening my stance to “shorten” myself. (I also tend to stand that way when talking one-on-one with people shorter than me, so I’m more on their level.)

I didn’t want to stand out more than I already did, so I kept quiet. I was a shy kid to begin with, but I hated the attention so much that I learned to be agreeable, to withhold my opinion whenever possible, to stay thin to avoid looking like a linebacker or a wall of a person. Going bowling or ice skating was an exercise in embarrassment; I’d worry the whole time leading up to it that the place wouldn’t have my size, and when I got there, I’d wait for everyone to pay before mumbling my size, with the hope that nobody else would hear it. Shoe shopping? Forget it. I’d dread the awkward reactions people would have when they realized I’m an 11, a size many stores don’t even carry (or if they do, they’re horribly bulky and orthopedic-looking, as if only Herman Munster rocks shoes that large).

Things got a little easier my senior year of high school, when more guys finally started catching up to me in height, and they were even better in college, when people have more important things to obsess over (exams, figuring out your passion, which items from the Taco Bell value menu to order for dinner) than another person’s height. Really, though, the biggest change occurred when I caught my reflection one day: Here was this happy girl, laughing and hanging out with friends…who was slouching like Quasimodo. I tried to take up the least amount of space possible to avoid drawing attention to my height, and in the process, made myself look 10 times worse. I had to stop hiding and just accept who I am.

To this day, that’s not always easy. I get sensitive when I’m watching TV with friends and somebody jokes about a female celebrity being “huge” or if a person asks to guess my shoe size (which actually happens, and is always awkward). I try to shake it off, but sometimes, those words linger longer than I’d like them to. For the most part, though, I look to women who own their height — every last inch — and look graceful, not giraffe-ish, in the process (thank you, Karlie Kloss, Nicole Kidman, Charlize Theron and Taylor Swift!).

At this point, you may be wondering why I’m writing about wrestling with being tall on a site devoted to making your weekdays brighter. That’s just the thing — the more I’ve come to accept my height as just one small extension of who I am, the more enjoyable every day has become. It’s all come down to a simple realization, really:

The beauty of femininity is that there isn’t a one-size-fits-all definition, and we shouldn’t try to restrict ourselves to one.