“Sorry Riya, didn’t see you there!”

“Riya, are you like tall enough to go on rides at Great America?”

“Hey Riya, are you classified as a legal midget?”

The three examples listed above are merely grains of sand on the vast seashore of height jokes I have endured for the past 16 and a half years.

I have always been petite. I have always been featured in the front row of class pictures. I have always been glanced at dubiously by roller coaster operators as they attempt to gauge whether or not I meet the given height requirement.

I was teased about my height throughout elementary and middle school. The most memorable occurrence remains my friends Greg and Ohad’s hilarious shtick that involved looking over my head whenever I attempted to talk to them and asking nearby friends, “Hey have you seen Riya?” or “Where did Riya go?!” So funny, I always forgot to laugh!

I had hoped that my classmates would grow out of these immature jokes as we entered high school, but I was horribly mistaken. Here my height was even more pronounced—a pathetic 4 feet, 11 inches alongside many of my 6-footed peers. My advisory once chose “Let’s Measure Riya” as an amusing group activity and forced me to stand against the ruler in the weight room while Jaron, my advisor, regretfully informed me that I had not yet broken five feet.

While I laugh at many of these height jokes and often crack some of my own, I would be lying if I said they never bothered me. Though I know that the jokes come with a lighthearted intention, they can still rub me the wrong way if made continuously, unsparingly, and most importantly, irrelevantly. I laugh at jokes cracked about my height when they are humorous and relevant to the situation, but I get slightly peeved when they have absolutely nothing to do with the subject at hand. It’s one thing for someone to make a joke about my height when seeing me struggle to reach a book on a high shelf in the library, but quite another when I am frustrated with assigned APUSH reading and someone jokes that the chapter is larger than me.

I’ve never really understood why short stature is often made fun of in our society, but maybe that’s because I’ve always been on the receiving end of the teasing. Perhaps if I were average height, say about 5-foot-5 or so, I would be the one taunting others about their proximity to the ground. I believe that height jokes, like all other forms of teasing, stem from ridiculing those who are different and do not seem to conform to standards, which in this case is a perceived social height requirement.

I am frequently asked if being short bothers me. I always stop and think for a moment before answering this question, because the answer isn’t quite so simple. There are, of course, a few (okay, many) things about being minute that irritate me. My legs will never look as alluring in dresses as some of my taller friends whose legs seem to go on not just for days, but rather for millennia. My jeans will forever fit perfectly on my hips but gather around my ankles. Towering audiences eternally obstruct my view in movie theaters and school assemblies.

But then I remember all the things I love about being small: never being taller than my date, killing it at hide-and-seek, snagging a prime front row spot in group photos, and being, as my friends would say, “extremely huggable.” Plus, if I ever feel the urge to be tall, there’s always a great pair of stilettos. The turning point in my decision to stop hating being short and to begin embracing it came when I realized that being teased about my height was much better than being teased about other things. Isn’t it better to be teased about height rather than, say, a terrible personality?

As my doctor apologetically informed me at my last appointment that she did not think I was going to grow much more, I don’t think I’m going to stop being short any time soon. For now, it’s better to love all four feet and eleven inches of myself as much as I can.

 This piece was originally published in the pages of the Winged Post on Mar. 12, 2014.