I take off my clothes and all these ties

[sovay]

The physical therapist I am seeing for my back has now referred to me clinically as tall and middle-aged. I have no issue with my age, but I have always thought of myself as on the shorter side of medium height and anything else an illusion of the way I carry myself. My family made me look up the average AFAB height in the U.S. My mother has offered to get me a cardigan for being tall and middle-aged in. In high school she was devastated when she grew that quarter-inch taller than Mickey Rooney, because now he would never ask her to dance. She is not very sympathetic.

Comments

[sovay]

(Except...I expect you to be about 5'7" or 5'8", and average AFAB US height is 5'4", so I suppose there's room in there.)

I am five-seven, therefore more than one standard deviation out from the average height. As an older child and younger adolescent, I was projected to come in at five-nine, but it did not in fact happen, which is probably one of the reasons I think of myself as not tall. I had been comforting myself for years that Peter Wimsey is canonically five-nine.

At 5'6" I also think of myself as medium height, perhaps a bit small, but I live in Minnesota, so I'm aware I'm wrong.

I can see how that would skew the statistics a bit.