The Weight of Smallness
For as long as I can remember I have identified with being small. Born 7 weeks prematurely, I weighed a mere ounce over my twin sister’s 4 pound frame, pictures of our early lives showing two jaundiced and scrawny bodies lying sprawled in the sun or on duvet covers. My entire childhood was spent clutching tiny trinkets, creating miniature art, and I obsessed over paying homage to the infinitesimal wherever I found it. When my sister and I enrolled in public school after homeschooling for the first half of the elementary grades, our birthday fell right in the tipping point between third and fourth grade, and despite our test scores making us eligible to join the older children the faculty pushed for us to be placed in third due to our small statures and shyness. In some manner I believe my subconscious still views me this way, or at least wants me to return to this weakened child, a twisted image depicted as a safer manifestation of myself.
At this point in my life I am just below average height, but I continually receive comments on my petiteness, my “tiny wrists” and the shock of some that I am in my mid-twenties and not a high school sophomore. By now smallness is something that I have internalized, using the signaling of others and my own cyclical rhetoric to determine my internal dialogue and the space I am allowed to take up. The acute awareness I have of the spatial, visual, auditory, and even emotional and energetic resources that I utilize in any given situation engrosses nearly every waking — and dreaming — moment. In crowds and on the street I pull my arms in, slipping as stealthily and quickly as I can manage around people in the attempt to never be in a single person’s way until I find a wall or corner to wedge myself into, hoping that by holding my breath I will be squeezed so tightly that I collapse into sliver of matter that no one will notice. When in the grocery store alone I religiously avoid carts, opting for a personal bag or basket to the painful detriment of carrying too heavy a load all to avoid the possibility of blocking an aisle.
Some of this can be chalked up to my on-going battle with social anxiety, but my consistent need to shrink reaches its slender fingers even into personal moments. I obsess about whether I am overusing my apartment’s common areas as if they are nonrenewable resources that my very presence will push into extinction. Just the thought of playing music only I am listening to out loud sends me into the rigidity of a mild anxiety attack. I curse myself if I pump too much hand soap out of my own bathroom dispenser for being wasteful and greedy. Left to my own devices, I easily fall into an existential spiral realizing that even my most insignificant actions like walking outside, one time purchases, or using a faucet will result in the deaths of hundreds of insects, impact the lives of people I will never meet, and alter the water quality of the oceans. Although some these realizations may make them feel powerful, but I just want to be ever smaller.
I have toiled endlessly to be minuscule, dreaming to barely press my fingertips to the earth rather than footprints, decreasing the toll I take on the world simply by being alive until I am a gossamer of existence. Though, as is the lifespan of delusions, I have woken up to see this is a fantastical and unattainable wish.
I am trying to accept a medium-sized role, one with just enough agency and ownership to be vocal on the issues I care about and for people I love, carve out a corner of the world to feel comfortable occupying, and grow into who I am supposed to be instead of hiding from it, but it is this very process that fills me with distress. Growth is something that happens gradually and in steps, logically I know this. My persistent fear shouts a prophecy of the cartoonish and disturbing expansion of Alice in her Wonderland, becoming grotesquely egocentric and unwieldy in my pursuit to find myself, but all life changes slowly, shivering and sprouting into new phases. Perhaps what I have longed to be in this life is a seedling, powerful with potential even in its smallness, awaiting the nudge of evolution with baited, joyous breath.
