Check Your Height Privilege

It’s said we covet what we don’t have, and do so with our eyes. The bald man walks into a room and sees only hair. The poor man, only wealth. And all the unlengthened see is height.

People look at me and see advantage. Worse, unearned advantage. I didn’t work for it. I didn’t suffer for it. I woke up one morning and there it was, unasked for, a vertical inheritance I was simply born into. A life without stepladders.

Here is what the unlengthened believe tall life looks like: panoramic views, effortless authority, a body that moves through the world like a man who owns it.

Here is what tall life actually looks like: Standard desk-to-chair ratios reduce you to a human pretzel. If you want to walk normally within eight hours of deplaning, economy, basic economy, standard economy, and upgraded economy are effectively the same seat. And pandemic plexiglass shields don't stop viruses, but conveniently funnel them toward the parts of your body responsible for breathing.

Oh, and don't get me started on clothes. At 6'4" I am exactly the wrong height for the entire clothing industry. Regular stops at 6'2". Big and tall begins at 6'5". I live in the three inches nobody planned for, the bastard child neither side will acknowledge.

Then there are shelves. Yes, I can reach high things, but that puts a target on my back.

It happens at the grocery store. It happens at the mall. My god, it even happens at IKEA. Strangers materialize from nowhere as if waiting for me specifically, and begin pointing skyward. I don’t mind. I am, after all, the one with privilege. So I reach. I retrieve. I return items like a man trying to fulfill his social contract.

But the requests escalate. There are things people have pointed to that Kareem Abdul-Jabbar would look at and think, “really?” Things that exist in retail altitudes I’ve never visited. Merchandise stored at an elevation usually associated with weather balloons.

And when you glance down, kindly, to explain, gesturing at the physical reality of the situation, they look at you the way people look at someone who has been given everything and chosen to give back nothing. Like you’re hoarding your height resources. Like you could reach it if you really tried. Like the problem isn’t the shelf. The problem is your commitment.

You were given so much, they think. The least you could do is stretch.

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Catch up on The Anecdote:

The Moving Dead

Welcome to Southern California Where We Kill Cuisine

The Smallest Thing on the Mountain