note: That is not me when I was small. It is someone else in my family. Can you tell who it is? There is a hint in the photo, and a lot of you have seen it before and already know the answer. If you do, don't say. If you don't, it might be fun to guess. Look how small that person is! They are not small any more :)
Recently we were out at Zeitgeist (another Story for another time) and the person sitting next to me on the bench in the backyard ended up squeezed kind of close to me, as can happen when you try to fit 36 people at one picnic table. "Hey," she said as she measured my thigh with her hand, "You're pretty small."
It's true in one way, I suppose, in that I am not the biggest adult. Actually for being an adult I am on the shrimpier end of the spectrum. On a tall day I stand 5'4" and am only slightly more than half the title of one of the best albums of all time: Sixteen Stone, by Bush. So really compared to many grown-ups I suppose that's not so big.
(sidepoint: Do you like the way I avoided telling you how much I weigh? Aren't girls weird? Isn't body image stuff messed up? What if some people thought that was too much? What if some people thought it was too little? Perhaps those of you who've been blog followers for awhile remember the OLD post about the social confusion I encountered around having my pants size outed? Yeah. Looking to avoid that kind of awkwardness again...)
But, it is hard to reconcile this objective information with what feels true to me about my size. I do not consider myself small in the least. Actually the opposite, I worry I am too big a lot of the time: big mouth, big ideas, big plans, big passions, big mistakes, the list goes on and on. And comparatively I am large in relationship to others in my life, considering that I spend six hours a day with hundreds of people mostly under the age of 12. So at school I am TALLLL. And wide. And big.
In the end it's all relative, I guess.
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