I consider myself simultaneously lucky and unlucky to have been swept up in a whirlwind romance in the eighth grade. Ever since, I have been coming to terms with the fact that my romantic endeavors might have peaked in middle school. I was dating the new guy—devilishly charming, funny, and rather attractive. Our relationship constituted of late night phone calls, sneaking out of the house to meet up, elaborate letters, seasons one and two of the O.C., dragonfly necklaces (hearts were so cliché), and stolen kisses during recess.

So imagine the cacophony of emotion when this boyfriend recounts a conversation with a friend, where they talked about how I was cute, but “a bit too short”. He wasn’t a great boyfriend in the end. But then again, it was also middle school.

I’ve always been short. Order was established all through elementary and middle school by height, so I always sat in the front of the class, led the girls’ line to our school assembly, stood in the front for class photographs, etc. I’ve always known that I’m short and, right up until middle school, I LOVED it. I loved leading the line, being able to see everything on the board, and being the first to receive anything distributed in class. But this moment, when my boyfriend said this to me, was the first time I’d received any indication that being short wasn’t considered a positive trait. From that moment on, it was like a filter on the world that I couldn’t un-see.

I remember laughing off his comment because I didn’t quite know how to respond to it. I vividly remember going home and google-ing the heights of various celebrities. I remember feeling relieved that, 1. Rachel Bilson, whom I adored (she played Summer on the O.C.) was also short, and 2. Google auto-completed my search terms with the appendage “height”, which meant that I wasn’t the only person looking this up, which meant that there had to be other short girls out there, who also felt like this was something to look up (and maybe be concerned about). I remember looking up every variation of “short famous people”, and trying to identify a socially acceptable height range as a short girl (based on the various heights of celebrities at the time, it was 5ft 2in).

Then came high school.

A common refrain in high school was “I love walking with you because you make me feel tall”. The unfortunate part was that people thought they were being nice when they said that. My best friend and I looked pretty alike, so when the number of boys interested in her was much higher than the ones interested in me, I was pretty convinced that it was because I was “a bit too short”. Fortunately, I had relatively healthy coping mechanisms. What I “lacked” in height, I “made up for” in spirit. To this day, I attribute joining Model UN and the debate team to my height. I added “I forget how short you are because you have such a big personality” to the repertoire of height-centric comments I received.

But the most important lesson I learned in high school came from a squabble with a friend. It was the end of the day, and I was walking this friend to her bus. Earlier in the day, my height had been the butt of one of her jokes (a very common occurrence), so when the opportunity arose to get her back, I was in full form. It was a sunny day, and I made a joke about how she looked the same even though she was squinting because her eyes were so small. In that moment, I realized two things.

The first was that it was socially acceptable to make fun of some physical features, but not others. The second was that everyone has their insecurities, and just because they don’t wear them on their sleeves doesn’t mean they don’t exist. The biggest realization, however, was that I had really, truly, deeply, hurt my friend. There was nothing I could say to take my words back, and my friend ran towards the bus with tears cascading down her face.

I resolved in that moment to never mock someone’s physical features again, and told myself that I didn’t have much of a choice but to take the jokes about my height because, for some reason, society felt pretty okay with commenting on people’s heights. For the most part, I’ve stuck to my resolve to respect other people’s physical features. After a lifetime of being short and about ten years of being told that it was a negative feature, I thought I had come to terms with my height.

I was wrong.

College made things a lot more confusing. I was raised primarily around people of South Asian and Middle Eastern descent. So when I went to college in the U.S., I somehow got shorter, by no fault of my own, because everyone around me was taller. I remember being courted by two tipsy (and pretty attractive) boys in my freshman dorm, which was amusing until they agreed that I had so much going for me except for my height. Yes, this pair of adults said exactly what my middle school boyfriend had said to me, all those years ago. I realized then that not much had changed with maturity, because I lived in a world where people felt like it was perfectly appropriate to ask me how tall I was, whether I could see over the steering wheel of a car, and whether I was legally classified as a midget (an incredibly offensive term that I hope you don’t ever use in any context, ever).

I have embraced my height. I’m wickedly talented at walking in heels, love it when my clothes shrink, and am perfectly comfortable in airline seats. For a while, I even referred to myself as “fun-sized”. I don’t anymore because I’m really over qualifying or justifying how I look by connecting it to my personality. But at the time, it was an endearing way to refer to my height, so I milked it for all its worth. But my sense of comfort in my own body somehow gave the socially cognizant and generally well-intentioned people around me the idea that they could not only comment on my height, but also make it a topic of conversation. A couple of my friends once asked me how short I was from across a room full of people, and I realized that my height had been the subject of their intense conversation for at least ten minutes.

One of the most important things to remember is that none of these comments or questions come from “bad people”. My world isn’t divided into good people and people who mock or otherwise comment on my height. This isn’t a critique on how some people need to be more socially cognizant. This piece is a commentary on how body shaming isn’t as glaringly obvious as the term makes it out to be. It is about how we all, myself included, need to be more aware of commenting on someone’s physical appearance, because social norms are socially constructed. Therefore, just because something seems okay to say doesn’t mean that it actually is okay.

I wear fitted clothes and think twice before buying and wearing looser outfits because a teacher once told me in high school that, as a short person, I should reconsider wearing baggy clothes. I dread going on dates with people I meet on Tinder because I don’t want their first thought to be that I’m “a bit too short”. I have to mentally prepare myself before going into a crowded bar or a networking event because I worry that I’m too short for people to hear or care about what I’m saying. I have an irrational fear that I probably shouldn’t drive a car because of my height…despite having driven a car. I choose to wear heels into a job interview because I want to feel more confident.

I don’t ask you about your weight, so please don’t ask me how tall I am. I don’t look at you and say “you’re so lanky”, so please don’t look at me and say, “you’re so short”. I don’t ask you if you need to add material to your sleeves because your arms are so long, so please don’t ask me if I get my jeans altered. I don’t ask you to bend over and touch your toes to observe how flexible you are so please don’t ask me to stand on my tiptoes just to see if I can reach something. I don’t ask you how you kiss partners who are shorter than you so please don’t ask me how I kiss people taller than me.

Sure, I’ve had respectful, casual, conversations about all these things with my friends, but there’s a difference between that and making the assumption that my height can be used as a topic for entertaining conversation. While each individual comment might seem harmless and inconsequential, it contributes to an overarching feeling of inadequacy.

One of the worst things about being shamed for an attribute that someone, somewhere, deemed socially acceptable to mock is that it is really hard to call people out on it. When asked to think of a scene in a movie where people were shamed for their height, a friend described this scene in The Wolf of Wall Street where the raunchy executives threw someone across the room. This scene is aggressive, but the guy being thrown consented to it, so we could debate whether it really is a body-shaming scene (I would argue that it still is).

The difference is that this scene is supposed to be problematic. Comments on my height might not seem problematic, but they are. I never signed my height up as a viable and acceptable topic of conversation. By assuming that you can talk about it, you are assuming my consent. Sure, I’m not being thrown across the room, but body shaming is hurtful because it is often subtle. When you comment on my height in nearly any context, you essentially feel entitled to claim ownership to that aspect of my physical appearance. My body feels less like my own. And that really, really, hurts.

It took a comment in middle school to make me feel like my body wasn’t perfect. But it took years of reaffirmation, subtle and explicit, to make me realize how much I want to love my body for the imperfection that it is, and that is precisely what I hope to spend the rest of my years doing.