Body positivity isn’t just about weight

Let me go ahead and answer everyone who thought they were oh so clever in my past 22 years of life: the weather up around my head is just fine, thanks. Let me also say that being just shy of 6ft tall doesn’t actually change the natural climate or air pressure from your head to mine, so you really weren’t being that clever at all. Honestly, you were contributing to a long list of reasons someone can doubt herself and muddle her self-confidence with the irrelevant and negative commentary of others.

People think body positivity solely applies to weight, but let me crack that narrow viewpoint open for you – body positivity means being content with every aspect of your body as unique and beautiful. For me, this is only recently starting to include my height.

I am a 22-year-old woman who has been 5’11 since freshman year of high school. I was always ahead of my class when it came to the height curve, which knowing elementary kids put a big, red target on my elevated back. But it wasn’t just childish jokes that contributed to my height insecurity. Fellow adults even today still remark at my height like I’m an exotic find that is both awe-inspiring and fear provoking.

I was always placed in the back of pictures, as if being tall is something to hide. Of course I understand that every proud parent wants to see their child’s face in the team picture, but there was always a stigma about the tall kids in the back, as if we weren’t as important or if our height was something to cover up.

To this day, I squat, lean, hunch, or some monstrous combination of the three for almost every picture I’m a part of. After enough times of being put in the back line and enough times of friends telling me to “Squat down you’ll be out of frame” or making me look like a baby, it’s sadly a subconscious instinct.

I constantly either hunch over or sit into one hip when talking to people so that I’m closer to their eye level in conversation, and there have been innumerous times I’ve strolled past a mirror or window reflection only to be horrified by the hunchback who was looking back at me. It’s beyond baffling that I have been accommodating everyone else’s perceptions of me to such a drastic point that my hips and back are weaker and misaligned to a notable degree because of it.

Not to mention all the countless school dances I went to in sandals or ballet flats because my friends or date were shorter than me. Since when did it become a rule that we all have to be exactly the same and that women must be shorter than their counterpart? Funny thing is, I enjoy wearing heels. I like the way my legs look in them, I like the clanky sound they make when I walk in them, and I like how I feel powerful or girly or both in them. But for years I let myself be shamed out of wearing heels for nice events or to just feel good one day because I was overly conscious of how other people felt standing next to me.

I still have to force myself to stand tall in pictures, to wear the shoes I want, and to not worry if my height is inconveniencing those around me – in other words, to stand tall. And isn’t that really the heart of body positivity – to stand tall exactly as you are, embracing your body as uniquely beautiful?

I urge my future self, all my fellow tall women, and anyone who has ever put other people’s opinions and insecurities before your own well-being physically and emotionally to stand tall. Body positivity isn’t just about weight. Being tall, like every other quirky, individual trait should be embraced and felt as power not weakness.