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

[mrissa]

Oh what a relief. Everyone else on the internet is shorter than I expect them to be, it's nice to have an outlier. (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.)

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.

[lauradi7dw]

It gives you room to shrink. For most of my life my mother was talker than me. I caught up by the time she was eighty, maybe, because of her rate of shrinkage, then passed her. Now I'm down 1.5" from my peak. Working on my posture, though.

[teenybuffalo]

You provoke many thoughts as usual:

You're absolutely a tall person, I confirm without remembering the number of feet and inches in height you are. It's more of a vibe, or mood, if you will, than anything else.

It can work the other direction too. One of the voice teachers I worked with when I was into acting was a kindly British woman who must have been 6'1" at least, but you wouldn't have noticed it because she had Short Person Energy.

My mother has offered to get me a cardigan for being tall and middle-aged in. That's a great line.

Mickey Rooney didn't deserve your mother anyway.

I began to accept that I was middle-aged when I started getting really into different ways to prepare oatmeal. The next phase often involves carrying a copy of Richardson's Field Guide to Birds and a pair of binoculars everywhere. Will report back.

[vass]

Commiserations on your advanced height.

(I have been told that I carry myself on the internet like a short person. I chose to take that as a compliment, but I fear it was some variant form of fuckor where in fact a person's inference about you was not true but now you feel like it's exposed some deeper truth all the same.)

[cmcmck]

I'm 5'6" which is now average European female height, but I recall being thought tall when I was younger.

[troisoiseaux]

I was Noticeably Tall as a child, and I'm still taller than most of my AFAB friends, but I stopped growing at exactly the point in middle school when most of the guys I knew hit their growth spurts, so that was annoying.

I was once told by an internet friend that I have 5'3" energy, though. They did not elaborate. I still think about this.

[sara]

I'm tall enough that it's a hindrance to my dating life and honestly a nuisance socially and professionally -- I'm as big as a lot of guys so they read me as a threat. Meanwhile my children, who would prefer to be ambiguously and androgynously shaped, are strongly sexually dimorphic. Embodiment is a shitshow.

[selkie]

Let my mechuteniste buy you the cardigan! It’s nippy.
(You are tall, and you wear it very well.)

[ranalore]

I think of you as tall, but then I realize I think of you as my height. Before the various osteos began to shrink me, I was just under 5'9". Now, I clock 5'7". In my family, which tends to extremes in its AFAB members, that is on the short side of the tall extreme. Before age shrunk all of us, my parents were 6'2" (dad) and 5'3" (mom), and my sisters were half an inch over 5'9", 5'10" exactly, and just shy of 5'5".

I can never remember what average AFAB height is for my generation in this country. Granted, my brain tends to reject anything labeled "average" or "normal" as a matter of course, unless I can get a good story out of it.

[kore]

My half-sisters and I all got the height gene -- five-nine, five-ten, and six feet (me) respectively. ( had a monster growth spurt and was six feet tall when I was twelve years old! People thought I was in college. It was wild.

My husband is five-ten and says he enjoys my height, unlike all the guys who were five-ten and confidently said they were six feet or over and then were flummoxicated by my existing in flat shoes.

[gwynnega]

I've always thought of you as tall, but I'm 5'4", which is as average as it gets.

[skygiants]

I referred to myself (somewhere between 5.4" and 5.5") once as 'approximately the same height as most people' and have been relentlessly mocked for it by my loved ones ever since 😔