I’ve always been one of the tallest girls in my class. I grew up being taller than every single guy in my grade. But my height has never been in the forefront of my mind. I’ve always known that I’m tall, but I never thought that it affected the way people viewed me.

I never thought that guys wouldn’t like me because I was tall. I never really took into consideration how my height may affect how people perceive me.I didn’t think that anyone thought of me as the “tall girl”. No one has ever made fun of me, at least to my face, for being tall.

After watching the Netflix original movie “Tall Girl” I realized that my height may be more noticeable than I previously thought. The movie is about a high school girl who struggles with fitting in due to her height. She is constantly insecure because of her height but learns to embrace her height by the end of the movie.

This summer, I posted a picture of me and my friends at the lake and I was clearly the tallest one in the picture. After posting this picture, I received a text from a random guy asking how tall I was because I looked “giant” in the picture. This is when I realized: I was insecure about my height. It finally hit me that one of the first things people notice about me is my height.

In society, not many people want to date the tall girl. I get reminded of this constantly on social media, like Tik Tok, where guys post about how short girls are better.

I know this sounds bad and you should date whomever you like but I don’t think that I can date a guy under 6-feet tall  because in heels I am 6-feet tall. Out of all of my years of high school, I have been taller than three of my homecoming dates. Obviously this shouldn’t matter, but still, it doesn’t make me feel great about myself.

A few weeks ago I was at the mall looking for a dress for my friend’s birthday party and they only had large and smalls in the dress that I wanted and, of course, the large was too loose on me so I tried on the small. I walked out of the fitting room and the worker said she loved my dress but “I’m just so tall” that it doesn’t work. Dresses being short on me doesn’t really seem like a huge problem, but over time, the insecurities build up. When I try on multiple pairs of jeans and none of them fit it’s defeating, and the worst part is that I can’t do anything about it.

My height hasn’t always been a negative aspect of my life. People think I’m good at sports, I can see over people at concerts and when I was younger being the tallest in the class was the biggest flex.

My height isn’t something that I can change so it’s something about myself that I’m learning to embrace. As a teenage girl today, it’s really hard to embrace your body in the midst of harsh beauty standards but it’s about time that we start to.