Musing about being tall and feeling small

I realized recently that I’ve been too-long denied the healthy satisfaction of feeling small. Small being supported, cared for, equal, cradled, lifted, sweetly cherished by another. There’s a specific kind of isolation in feeling too big to be held when it’s all you really need. I’ve been bigger than most people around me my whole life. Those who were physically bigger than me felt little inclination to nurture my need to feel small, a sensation I believe we need in the right dose. And although feeling small is relative and not always about physical size, my physicality has been the biggest barrier for me in sorting out my performance of how much space to take up. Wanting to shrink or hide because you don’t truly feel safe but you’re 6’1” so you’re always in front, always leading, always seeming more bold and daring than you really are. Never getting to sit fully in feelings of being afraid or unsure because those feelings don’t go with big. I have no practice at being small—even with myself—because there’s a state of readiness you have to always maintain when you and others are always expecting you to show up as big. You’re the reacher, the helper, the bug getter, the handy tool and sometimes you don’t know how to be anything else. You’re the supporter, the lifter, the defender and you look like you can take some rough handling and so you do. You look like someone to test your strength against and so they do. And I think it’s worn on my sense of self or at least the self I feel most purely resonant with (without all of the many ways I’ve been conditioned) in that I sometimes I don’t know to show up as me. Do I overshoot in feminine expression to offset feeling big and performing “likes to be held” or “please don’t ask me to hand you any items from the top shelf”?

Conceptually, the idea I’m speaking about still feels very nebulous as I try to describe it but it something I sense in most of my relationships and the denial of smallness often comes hand in hand with not being granted softness or weakness and sometimes that’s all I need. I also recognize where I deny myself permission to just exist in the soft ways I need to exist sometimes. In this next phase of life I want to give more of that to myself and share more with people who naturally give me permission to be this way.

Continued on 6/11/23…only to conclude that my Self doesn’t have a size and it’s okay for me not to feel resolved in this just yet. Truthfully, it does feel like resolution and a peacefulness about this are coming soon.