Day 10 – The End!

Today is the last day of my 10 day intervention exploring perception and experiences of small people in a big world! It has been a really interesting but uncomfortable experience being blatant about my height, and to be honest I’m glad I can return to being myself!!

 

In the last 10 days I have felt lonely, patronized, unconfident, embarrassed, and 100% out of my comfort zone. My height is really the only thing that I feel self-conscious about, and drawing attention to it was quite an unpleasant experience, and has put me off my social game quite intensely – I look forward to regaining my confidence and peace of mind.

 

Thank YOU for reading this blog; I hope that my experiences provided some insights for you if you too are a small person living in a big world, or perhaps just an interested reader.

 

Peace! 🙂

 

Day 9 – theeeeere he is agaaaain!

The 10 day intervention is drawing to a close! Doing multiple, uncomfortable acts for the past 8 days has been challenging, but quite interesting. Yesterday’s flag-carrying expedition made me feel uncomfortable, but I felt it could be done a little bit better and more adventurously in order to carry out the full extent of the intervention.

 

Instead of just sticking to my route from home and Vega, I changed things up and wore the flag all around town, on my scooter, and inside shops. I felt this would better maximise the concept and purpose of having the flag with me at all times, and also maximise uncomfortable-ness.

 

I walked around the city centre, purposefully heading into large crowds of people, to see what would happen. I had predicted that, like the day before, people would notice and chuckle to themselves. Surprisngly though, when I entered large crowds, people took notice and actually moved out the way and gave me some walking space. They could see me coming, and figured that it was meant to be an indication of a small person, and I legitimately felt that I was bumped-into a lot less than when I usually enter large crowds of people without a flag.

 

I suppose that this means that some people sympathise with short people, especially short males. Even though we can survive just fine in crowds, and don’t mind being bumped into like everyone else, I guess it’s nice to know that some people care enough to create a little space for somebody vertically-challenged, even though it’s really, really not necessary.

Day 8 – Oh, Theeeere he is

After a defeating weekend, I picked myself up off the ground and continued with my intervention as diligently as possible.

 

Today I fashioned myself a red flag on a long stick, and carried it with me everywhere I went as high as I could. This was a tribute to how, often in cartoons and comic strips, the youngest or shortest character wears a cap with a tall protruding flag so that the rest of his/her friends can see where she is.

 

It felt quite weird carrying the stick all day because a lot of people caught the reference and laughed or chuckled to themselves. I really don’t enjoy drawing attention to my height, or lack thereof, so it made me feel quite uncomfortable carrying an indication of where I was. I quite like being able to fade into the background when I need to, and this was impossible while carrying a huge flag around in town and at Vega.

Day 7 – Goliath wins… I’m OUT.

Things didn’t go great for me last night at Side Show…

Good morning world…

 

As you know, last night I went to Side Show with the intention of trying only to chat-up and meet girls who were considered tall. I expected that this would prove to be a difficult task, and I expected to feel uncomfortable approaching tall girls and trying to charm them, because I consider my height quite a hinderence and an unattractive feature to female of tall stature. I did, however, believe in myself, and told myself to approach the situation with confidence, and not take any rejections too personally.

 

This, however, was much harder than expected.

 

Never before had I been rejected, ignored, and pushed passed as many times as last night! It really sucked. I approached 9 different tall girls at various times of the evening in various parts of Side Show. I didn’t try and be overly manly or act weird in any way, I was just my quirky, confident and polite self… but these ladies were having none of it. Most of the girls just plain ignored me, and kept looking ahead. Some of them smiled at me and said “Ag you’re so small and cute!” and then walked away… even worse.

 

Last night really sucked – I felt really uncomfortable, patronized, unattractive, and unconfident by the time I got home. Last night was the hardest day of this intervention, and I look forward to never going out again, ever, and buying 13 cats and devote my life to gardening.

Day 6 – Big Pimpin’

So today is Saturday, and is also my good friend Chris Jones’ 22^nd birthday. He is celebrating his birthday at a club in Buitengracht Street called Side Show, and has kindly put me on the guestlist J

 

So tonight is going to be my biggest challenge yet: There is a well-known stigma and opinion that short men struggle to get girls, especially in night clubs.

Now In my experience, I have seldom had a girl turn me down because of my height, and have never really felt that my love life was hindered by my height. To put this to the test, I decided that tonight I would try my best to chat-up and meet girls that were A LOT taller than me. My height, and less than a full head taller than me, was not allowed – only girls that were considered ‘tall’. It seems like a David vs Goliath situation, but I have a feeling that David might not live up to expectations this time. I will report back tomorrow with my findings…

 

Please note that I do not intent to seem chauvinistic or disrespectful to women by doing this! This is purely an experiment for a university project. I apologise if anybody is offended by my actions.

 

Day 5 – Ballin’

Today I decided to revisit my old high school, Camps Bay High School, to practice with the first team basketball team. Now, when I was in grade 11 and grade 12, I played for their 1^st basketball team. This was not because there was a lack of tall, co ordinated sportsmen at Camps Bay High, but because I was actually quite a good baller! I played on the wing, and was quite good at dribbling and snap shots at the hoop. When I played for 1^st team, I was friendly with most of the other players in the basketball team, as I had known them for most of my high school career. Now, revisiting my old high school and practicing with their team a whole 3 years later… I knew nobody. Not even the coach! Being the shortest person in the basketball team in matric wasn’t such a biggie, because my coach and teammates knew I was capable. Today, I expected things to be way different, seeing as though nobody had seen me play before. Also, I haven’t played since high school, so my basketball was rusty to say the least…

 

At first, when we played a practice game, I didn’t get much ball time at all. I could see that the rest of my team were hesitant to pass the ball to me, which made me uncomfortable and made me feel out of place, and a bit embarrassed. As the game progressed, however, I got into the stride of things quite nicely. My teammates started passing to me more and more once they had seen my shooting, dribbling, and passing skills. It felt like I was right back in high school! The one thing that was different was that I had a beard, and I was WAY unfit. After a quick 20 minute game, unfortunately my team lost 23 – 31, but I felt great that I contributed to 12 of those points!

 

It just goes to show, it’s not the size of the player, but the size of your heart that counts. Today could have been an awkward, embarrassing experience had I not shaped-up on the court, but it turned out to be a really fun experience. After 4 days of feeling weird and uncomfortable, today was a nice refreshing breath of comfort. Don’t tell my lecturer!

Day 4 – Name Calling.

Using an old white T shirt and a koki, I wrote various derogatory names and phrases that people would refer to short people as, and wore the shirt for the day.

 

This made me extremely uncomfortable, as these names and phrases took me back to the names I was personally called during preparatory and primary school. Names like “short-shit”, “midget”, “Shorty”, “dwarf”, “stompie”, and “ankle-biter” were written on the T shirt. This would blatantly indicate my shortness, or at least how I perceived my shortness, to the public.

 

The reactions I got were quite interesting – A lot of people stared at me, some chuckled to their friends, and some looked quite saddened! One woman approached me and said “shame man, you’re not that short!”… This kind of public attention that drew blatant attention to my shortness made me feel terribly uncomfortable, and I actually felt quite miserable. My whole personality and charm relies on my boldness and confidence, and that was all stripped away by wearing this shirt of shame that I had made myself. So, mission accomplished I guess!

Day 3 – Big, Again.

Today, I decided to wear high heels again, determined to be noticed!!!

 

These heels were much more bad-ass, and I decided to wear shorts instead of long pants so that they were more visible and noticeable. These heels were also much more uncomfortable, and made walking a lot harder, so a lot of the attention and weird looks that I did receive were purely from my lack of co ordination while performing the basic act of walking from A to B.

 

I didn’t feel as comfortable as I did on day one – the heels I wore on day 1 were much more discrete in terms of colour and appearance, so today many people assumed that I was “swinging the other way” or doing an intervention about crossdressing, which defeated the point of wearing them in the first place. I even got a few whistles.

 

So day 3 didn’t quite go as planned… Back to the drawing board!

Day 2 – Baggy Clothes

Today, I tried to achieve the opposite of yesterday’s objective – to shrink myself down and appear smaller than I really am.

I did this by dressing in plainly-coloured, oversized and baggy clothing. For the whole day I kept to myself, didn’t speak other than when spoken to, and adopted a rather timid persona in order to effectively “shrink myself down”.

The outcome was rather sad and lonely – whereas I had felt quite upbeat about wearing high heels and being a bit taller yesterday, today was quite a depressing day! I obviously associate smallness with negative emotions such as sadness and loneliness, and found it hard to feel good about myself and about the day when I was apparently smaller than usual.

Even though yesterday’s insights suggested that perhaps I was making a bigger deal out of my height than other people and that perhaps my height didn’t really make me feel that uncomfortable after all, today’s insights suggest that I do still have an issue with my own height and how it relates to my identity. Experiencing height on the other side of the spectrum has helped contextualise and put into perspective how I do indeed have issues with my height, but seldom other people do too. This helps to understand and fathom how this issue can easily be dealt with, solved, and worked on within my self.

We soldier on!!

Day 1 – Taller than Usual

19/05/2014

 

Hello world!

To mark the start of my 10 day long body intervention, I decided to ‘rock some heels’.

My mother kindly leant me a pair of small black high heels, that added a good 7cm to my height. They were EXTREMELY uncomfortable and made walking an art of its own. I am proud to say that I did not fall over once (in public), and strutted my stuff all day long.

I had never wore high heels out in public before, and was very curious as to what people would say, think, or notice about what I was wearing on my feet. I definitely felt taller, and was sure people would notice the height I had gained…

Nobody even noticed.

I was legitimately surprised when nobody made any comments on my choice of footwear or my taller stature! In fact, my friends at Vega who were also doing their interventions had to ask me what I was doing, not noticing my extra height. For me it was blatantly obvious, but for others the change was unnoticeable.

I guess that means that I perceive my lack-of height to be a bigger deal than it actually is to other people, which is good 🙂