Things Not To Say To Tall People

(Before I start, THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU A MILLION TIMES to all my friends and family who have extended lovely comments and shared the video – your kind words, hilarious responses and continuous support will ALWAYS mean the world to me).

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Half of me is a little sad that I feel so inclined to write this post; nervous, even. With fear of sounding arrogant and overly indignant.

The other half, however, is revitalised, energised, inspired and doesn’t give a flying f*** how I sound.

Read this: you’ll see how much I care about this topic and maybe why.

Yesterday a video was released for the BBC3 online series “Things Not to Say to…” – a series of short videos where people from various walks of life pull random questions out of a bowl that they’re typically forced to answer everyday.

For instance: Things Not to Say to:

• An Autistic Person

• A Single Person

• Twins

• A Trans Person

• A Refugee

• Someone of Mixed Race

…and so on and so forth. It’s a fantastic series and I highly recommend it; because, as predictable as we humans are, when faced with someone or something that we aren’t familiar with or isn’t the norm – we immediately feel the need to ask questions. And sometimes…most times…these questions aren’t necessary.

The series is a fun and honest way of addressing how annoying some of these questions can be.

A couple of months ago, I noticed that there wasn’t one for tall people and with encouragement from my friend and then colleague, Leanne, I emailed the creators and asked them why. Their follow-up was to shoot one and asked if I’d like to take part!

If you know me at all, you know I l i t e r a l l y jumped at the chance. Somewhere I could chat and vent about the gripes of height with little to no judgement? I mean c’mon.

It was a fun, hour and some change shoot. They’d collated tons of questions for us to answer, had spoken with and met loads of tall people and understood our grievances. Satema, one of the brilliant Researchers working on the series, apologised to us as she admitted to often being one of those people who’d ask these types questions…then she asked if she could take a picture between us because she was pretty short and thought it would look funny.

Of course I agreed; I’d taken two height reference pictures with strangers already that day – what’s one more to the table? Because regardless of how much it can annoy me or how shitty I might feel that day – I always answer the questions, take the pictures, grab the thing on the top shelf, return the thing to the top shelf, ignore the stares and people taking pictures of me without my permission, to share and gawk at with their friends, my feminity being questioned simply because I’m taller than the 5’4 female average. I accept the jokes, both the funny ones and the ignorant ones – etc etc etc. If I didn’t make peace with these very repetitive and sometimes-intrusive requests and questions, I’d really struggle to leave my house each morning.

A lot of people would.

So yesterday, the Things Not to Say to (Very) Tall People video was released and of course I shared it everywhere and received an overwhelming positive response from my friends and family (minus my mum who says I curse too much).

Hypocritically though, I couldn’t help going through the masses of comments from strangers – the good, the bad and the ugly: (hypocritically because I’ve always warned people to stay away from comments if they’re ever in the public eye – as everyone is entitled to their opinion and some people can just be mean.)

I went through about 300 varying comments on various social platforms before I realised, I actually didn’t care what they said…especially since most of the negative ones, I’d already heard before:

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“I'm 5ft3 and my fiancé is 6ft, I love my tall man he makes me feel safe. It annoyed me when that girl, said short people should stay in their lane. What a stupid statement, so everyone has to be with someone of the same height. Just to please her, no woman is I going to tell me what to do.”

- If you really think I actually care when a short woman is with a tall man, you clearly think I have a LOT of time on my hands and no other issues in my life.

- Also – if you can’t see that I was tryna be funny here (clearly I failed for some people) then sorry I’m not sorry. I am only responsible for what I say, not how you take it. 

- Finally, if anyone thinks that I don’t or haven’t dated men shorter than me then you are sadly mistaken. I’ve also dated men taller than me. Men from a different race or religion than me. Men much bigger or skinnier than me. But if a man approaches me with: “I’ll chop you down like a tree,” “you weren’t born a man were you” or any other silly comment related to my height or how much they ‘don’t care’ about my height when they’re sticking out their chest and trying to make themselves feel/look/seem taller around me – then it’s a hard pass.

-P.S. You think I don’t wanna feel safe? You think I don’t wanna be the little spoon sometimes? Think of it.

“The girl with the white crop top and blue jeans is so beautiful.”     

- Aww thanks hun…but then someone responded with…

“she looks like a man”

- Well, you know, sometimes I probably do

“if you get offended by "how tall are you?" then your parent should've slept that night because you're a waste of sperm tbh”

- That’s actually one I’ve never heard before – kudos!

“That black girl in the white top ...anger issues tho”

- That’s the thing. I’m not angry. I love my height - I’ve had to learn to love it and am still learning to love it some days. But you try getting asked the same questions every . single . day . about something blatantly obvious about you…your hair colour, your skin colour, your height….and in, a lot of the time, an awestruck yet disgusted way.

It gets boring.

It’s annoying.

You may very well go on some bloody rants yourself!!!!

Okay, maybe I am a bit angry BUT not at my height and not always at the questions. I get angry that people think it’s absolutely fine to say horrible things to anyone that doesn’t fit their norm, then complain when said person complains.

But also, these things are what make me who I am today; it’s what allows me to see the beauty in things that some people don’t find beautiful. And it allows me to uplift people who sometimes need elevating.

So I try not to complain (keyword here: TRY). Because my inspiration for this post, my inspiration to revamp my blog, my inspiration to always speak candidly about height, my inspiration for my soon to come web-series, Six Foot Something (soon to come, don’t quote me, I’m all talk), is comments like these:

“actually: this video was very necessary. as someone who struggles a lot with their hight, this helped me a ton.”

“This is so relatable. Im 16 and im 6'1”

“Being a tall girl is hard. I'm 16 and already a little over 6 ft and it really does affect my confidence. I hear shorter girls talk about them wanting a tall boyfriend and complaining if they're taller than a guy. Like I'm taller than everyone I dated lmao. They say they don't mind I'm taller but a little part of me thinks guys like short girls and want to feel big around their partner. That's just not something I can do for my partner and I feel bad.”

It was the MANY comments like this that made me happy that I do often speak before I think – especially about height.

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Because one thing I’ve noticed about myself, is how I have self censored, made myself smaller, quieter – for everyone else’s sake; and that’s detrimental – because that is why people still think it’s okay to speak so freely about a stranger’s appearance/disability/race/religion/etc in negative ways. That is why these types of videos exist – because we do not speak up.

I make it my duty to tell young, tall girls how beautiful they are – because believe it or not, it’s something that isn’t always made apparent to us. And seeing the actual joy in their faces when I say that, having them over and over thank me for such a small compliment, and seeing them walk away with their backs just that little bit straighter – is what I say this shit for.

(and if you think that means I do not empower those of various races, sexes (or non binary) religions, appearances AND heights, then idk for you and your brain).

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I won’t ONLY rant about being a tall, black woman in an average, white man’s world – but I sure will talk about it often.

And some other shit too.