Before we moved to Milton I thought I was short. Both of my two friends in Colfax were taller than me. Then I moved here and I met Lizzy and Katy.

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The realization that I was not the shortest girl on the planet was a defining moment in my life. It wasn’t until around 9 months after we moved to Milton that I met the people I was taller than though, which is good because I wasn’t taller than them when we first moved there and if I had met them at the beginning I might have thought that Florida had some strange growth accelerator for young girls from the rural area of Washington state who had low self confidence concerning their height.

Everything was going great. I had one friend who was way taller than me, but that was okay ’cause she was way taller than everybody, and three girls who were shorter than me. I even had a guy friend who was my age and was shorter than me. All was going excellently…until Danny and Spencer went through growth spurts. I say, it was in the one week between our co-op classes that both of them went through growth spurts that sent them towering over me.

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In one week my height-confidence when down to an all time low. I had to stand on tip toe to reach their elbows. It was devastating. I didn’t know what to do. I considered investing in a good pair of stilts, but I thought that my peers might laugh at me for taking such desperate measures. So I resolved to just get used to it and moved on with my life. I was now short. Well, actually I was kinda nowhere. My guy friends and Tori were tall and Katy and Lizzy and Josh were short. I was just a blob of a person who was neither tall nor short. It was horrifying and it took every amount of my perseverence to make it through this trying and unknowing time in my life. It brought up questions that ran through my head 24/7. Who am I? Why am I here? Am I tall or short?

Then one day, it happened.

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I realized I was WAY taller than any of my brothers and any child under the age of 4. I was tall! I thought. I wasn’t really sure. But being able to reach a shelf and save an innocent child from being forced into a dreadful situation of having to make J sandwiches because they were too short to reach the PB was really a confidence booster.

Life was back to normal. I was happy and carefree and stuff.

That summer we started volleyball. What a sport! Before you strengthen the God-given springs that are hidden somewhere in your legs you must attempt to jump as high as you can and fail miserably because you don’t really know how to. Spencer and Danny just had to stand at the front of the net and put their hands up to block the ball, but for us shorter ones we had to jump. WAIT. I’m short now? I was beginning to get dizzy from all of the contradicting information coming at me, some saying I’m tall and the other that I am excessively short. I was tall, I knew it! Mom said I was. So I must be! But everyone who was taller than me called me short. Everyone who was shorter than me called me tall. Does that make them average? What is average? Is there such a thing? Should I be that instead of tall? Or really is short the way to go? Volleyball wasn’t helping me decipher what all this meant.

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It was a mess.  How would I ever get a job? How could I teach my children? I mean, come on. If I couldn’t even tell my kids if I was tall or short, how was I supposed to tell them how to find the square root of 33? Life was becoming a dark hole that had pokey walls so I couldn’t climb out of it. How would this effect my future.

It wasn’t until the day I made a decision about it that the pokey things on the wall turned into steps that I could walk up.

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And life was good once more.

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