The Work of Height
The inside dope on what it's like up there at 7 feet
Today's article offers something completely different.1 I recently sat down with a long-time friend — an intelligent, extremely well-proportioned seven-footer2 who has had to spend much of his life analyzing the strange challenges and quirks of extreme height — and asked him to share his experiences in a way that might help "normies" understand a life lived far above average.
What followed was a candid conversation about navigating a world built for much shorter people. My friend described the daily indignities, unexpected advantages, and peculiar social dynamics that come with extraordinary height.
I've presented his story in his own words, edited only for clarity.
I'm constantly bombarded with the question: "How tall are you?" It's the first thing people want to know, followed by predictable comments and questions I've heard countless times. There's no escape from this interaction, and after a while, you just develop stock responses.
Cooking is a genuine physical ordeal because standard countertops are absurdly low for me. After just fifteen minutes of food prep, my back goes into spasms from hunching over. It's one of those simple daily activities most people take for granted that becomes a painful experience at my height.
The bathroom presents its own unique challenges. I regularly clog toilets, not because of any dietary issues, but simply because my waste is proportional to my size. It's embarrassing but a biological reality. Standard toilets are essentially children's potties for someone my size. My legs go dead quickly when seated on something so disproportionately small.
Urination comes with inevitable splatter issues regardless of aim. The physics of releasing from such a height means that no matter how precisely you target, distance creates problems. It's just another small indignity in a world not built for my proportions. This is also the case with shaving; when the hair falls down from a greater height it's not simply going to land in the center of the sink.
I'm pretty sure I have a normal-sized bladder relative to my frame, but with above-normal fluid consumption necessary for my size, I find myself urinating every hour. Finding facilities when you're out and about becomes a constant preoccupation.
There's really no way I can fit into a bed that is less than a queen. Even in a queen-sized bed it is necessary for me to sleep diagonally. So in reality, only a king-sized bed is adequate for me, but I will never make a fuss if offered a queen since complaining about this seems a little bit unreasonable, even for a person of my size.
On Travel and Public Spaces
Airlines are my personal nightmare. I have plenty of anecdotes about the impossibility of fitting into standard airplane seats, the futility of even "premium" options, and the social awkwardness that comes with physically not fitting into spaces everyone else takes for granted.
A flight in America always begins with TSA screening. Apparently I'm too tall to pass through the regular explosives scanner, but I didn't find that out for over 20 years. It took me exactly that long for the first TSA employee scrupulous enough to realize that I was over the height limit and explain to me that regulations required him to ask me to step aside for a manual wave-down. I guess that's a testimony to airport worker indolence; all these years as I stood with my arms raised above my head in that full body scanner, I could have probably had bomb residue on my fingers and nobody would have known because they were too tall to be detected.
Prior to the recent decline in economy airline conditions, every time I would approach the ticket counter somebody would be fast to try to get me into an emergency exit row seat. Or the same would happen when a steward(ess) saw me sit in a regular seat. That all has changed with the advent of premium economy pricing. Nowadays either is a rarity, and I'm immediately greeted with apathy when I ask a question like whether or not there's any free seating in bulkhead or the emergency exit. I do NOT pay for business or first class because I don't collect frequent flier miles and the upgrade price is far too exorbitant considering it's only paying to assuage a few hours of discomfort. On the other hand, every Asian airline I've ever flown on has upgraded me to first class or economy almost immediately, without any request on my part.
Economy seating varies greatly by carrier, which is one reason why I like to fly JetBlue because sight unseen, I always know for certain I will be minimally comfortable no matter which of their flights I'm on. If I find myself in a situation with an abnormally small amount of legroom, I am almost always at least flying with an aisle seat, and relieve the pressure by sticking my feet out in the aisle. If the steward(esses) bumps into my shoulder with the food cart without apologizing, I make sure to stick my legs/feet all the way into the middle of the aisle so that I can trip them every time they push past. Not one of these airline employees has ever had the balls to ask me to fold my abnormally long legs back under my seat after ramming into me several times. It's almost like they understand the rules of the game.
Interestingly enough, my shoulder width poses as much as (if not sometimes more of) a problem than seat space. I am far more wide than the seat despite having low body fat, and I always do my best not to occupy more than roughly half of the armrest. Usually my neighbor has no qualms about mashing their own forearm across the entirety of the shared armrest.
I'll get up to stretch quickly about every two or three hours. Funny enough, every time somebody is doing some exorbitant stretching routine in the aisles (like tai chi), it's somebody barely above five feet tall. I somehow manage not to hit anybody at all on the way to the bathroom, despite being hit by five or six people an hour when I sit in my aisle seat (this is much like riding on the subway, where I have absolutely no problem fitting within the confines of a single seat, unlike many much smaller people sitting next to me who feel compelled to "spread").
The subway can also be a challenge, depending on which city I'm in. In London I am not sure I can stand upright in any of the cars. In New York, I always board in the middle of the car because the ends of the car are too short for me to stand up. On a hot day I might need to sit down because hot air rises and the air is particularly sweltering at my usual mouth-level. I may not be able to walk upright for many hundreds of feet at a time at certain subway stations. You probably never noticed that some of these underground ceilings have actual stalactites of grime and other small filth that are in danger of falling onto the top of my head or into my mouth if I do not walk with my head to the side at a careful angle.
The bathroom is quite often an insane and disorienting experience. Many times there will be a horizontal tilt to the roof such that it angles upwards from the top of the toilet wall back to the door. This means that I either have to hunch forward or lean backwards like a limbo position. Both of these stances present an extraordinary obstacle to standing urination, and I'm not about to sit down on an airplane toilet to piss. So I usually end up adopting a concave body position with my groin thrust forward and my head and shoulders back (like dodging bullets in the Matrix), and I try to force my urine stream out as rapidly as possible so I don't get any on my shoes or the floor or the toilet seat, since it's impossible to maneuver my crotch past the lip of the toilet bowl. There's often some spillage, which I do not always bother trying to clean up if the bathroom already looks like a Texaco station urinal.
Longer flights barely serve any food in the complimentary meals and I have no qualms about asking for extra uneaten dinners after I've finished my first one, since I am not fat and it implicitly reinforces the fact that they've served a child's portion to a giant man.
There seems to be an open question of social etiquette as to the best way to recline in an airplane seat. I'd like to be the person to authoritatively dictate the desirable default behavior on this one. Personally, I do not often "pay backward" the discomfort of cramped seating, and so I only recline if conditions are unusually tight or the flight is long. However, each time I do so I always make sure to look directly back and make some kind of eye contact (if possible) with the person behind me, before SLOWLY letting my seat back.
I am not above passive-aggressive retaliation and when somebody suddenly lets their seat back in front of me I will sometimes react by doing things like sticking my feet under their chair until my shoes make contact with their shoes. Or I'll bounce their seat back and forth on the same knees they almost crushed. Disappointingly, this never sparks a conflict or even a reaction because I'm pretty sure they know they inconvenienced an extraordinarily tall person. But they will never respond by raising their seat back to the upright position, either.
On Social Perception
People grade me on a severe curve socially. If I interact with others in even a remotely normal fashion, I'm celebrated as a "gentle giant." The bar is literally on the floor. There's this strange assumption that height correlates with aggression or lack of social grace, so when I demonstrate basic human decency, people act genuinely surprised.
My height has made me hyper aware of how I occupy space. I've developed specific behaviors to seem less imposing, despite the fact that I can't actually change my physical presence.
Smaller guys (usually no taller than ~5'7") have tried to start fights with me using the following lines:
"Yo I bet I can dunk on your ass"
"Yo I bet you can't even dunk"
"I bet I could kick your ass"
"I bet you have a small ass dick"
This is roughly my mileage when it comes to meeting women:
6'3"+ - No interest in me
5'9"-6'2" - High interest
5'3"-5'8" - Standard level of interest
5'2" and below - Extremely high interest; often come up to me immediately and are unreserved about making a "joking" introduction like, "We would make the craziest looking couple" or "Haha we could never be a couple" while proceeding to flirt with me.
From a relatively early age, I've also learned never to fold my arms across my chest in a public space when I'm bored, because it will be assumed that I'm a bouncer or some form of security.
People stare at me wherever I go but I notice this far less than anybody who's accompanying me. I've learned to tune out people staring at me or swiveling around to watch me to a good degree as a sort of self defense mechanism — so I don't go crazy. On the other hand, I'm still very unfortunately attuned to hearing comments made in passing about my height or basketball, etc.
On Clothing Challenges
"Big and Tall" stores are a cruel joke. What they really mean is "Big and Fat." Finding clothes for someone of my height who isn't also overweight is nearly impossible through conventional retail. The assumption is that if you're tall, you must also be as wide as a circus tent. I'm boxed into the reality of needing the shirt length that only a 2XL or 3XL provides, but which comes at the expense of billowing arms or a fluttering shirt that two of me could squeeze into side by side. I could wear a size XL t-shirt… but at the expense of rocking it like a crop top.
I happen to be extremely lucky as somebody who has relatively small feet and wears a size 15 shoe. If you're fortunate enough to be a size 15 or 16, you can still find larger brands that offer what you need. In my case it means latching on to certain labels for life. Kenneth Cole used to offer many dress shoes up to size 16 so that meant I never searched anywhere else for this kind of footwear for years. The same goes for Nike when it comes to athletic wear.
Another thing I never realized until much later was that no standard baseball cap fits my head. It's something I never noticed because I don't wear hats. But… one does experiment with fashion every now and then. I found myself getting a splitting headache… so I'd open the clasp to its maximum width. Still a headache after thirty seconds. Huh. There goes that idea. A dentist once told me during a checkup that I had the widest jaw aperture of any patient he had ever looked at in his career. No dentist ever told me anything about having a wide jaw… so there may be all kinds of world records that are casually set on a daily basis with nobody to take note of them.
On Physical Navigation
Contrary to what many believe, hitting my head isn't a constant concern in unfamiliar environments where I'm paying attention. The real danger comes in familiar places when I'm using muscle memory and get distracted. That's when I'm likely to have painful encounters with low doorways or fixtures.
So, for example, being helpfully warned by the flight attendant to watch my head is of absolutely no help. I've never once hit my head on an airplane overhang. But if somebody startles me by calling my name as I'm walking into my own room, I might very well swing around abruptly and slam my head on the doorframe.
On Sports and Physical Assumptions
People have always made assumptions about my athletic abilities based solely on my height. My mother actually had to bring my birth certificate to sports games to prove my age, because coaches and parents from opposing teams were convinced I must be older than my peers to be so tall.
When I was a kid playing soccer, my mom had to show up to every one of my 8 and 10-under matches with a copy of my birth certificate, to placate the furious parents of other children on the opposing teams demanding to know why I was there.
Other Matters
I am often quite uncomfortable at events like concerts because I am very self-conscious about being that freakishly tall person blocking the view of somebody else. That means that in standing room areas I always stand towards the back of the crowd or in a wide open area. In seated venues I am often slouching down in my seat and tilting my head to the side to lower the top of my head. I also do this in the movie theater. This does not provide for pleasant seated events longer than a half hour or so.
Almost without fail, small dogs are absolutely terrified of me, and my approach or attitude seems to make little difference to me. On the other hand, I've encountered more than one Great Dane who was dragging their owners around, and simply looked up at me and sat on his haunches in submission when I took the leash in my hand.
Several readers told me they enjoy the “as told to” story from Canada’s top white-collar shoplifter, so I’ve decided to do more like it.
His proportions are such that it's easy to underestimate his height, in contrast to someone with freakishly long legs and a very short torso. A good example of the latter is current AEW wrestler Wlliam “Big Bill” Morrissey, who was formerly “Big Cass” in the WWE and a large part of whose gimmick centers around his being “seven feet tall, and you can’t teach that.” Morrissey, who was a backup center for the NYU Violets from 2005 to 2009, is actually closer to 6’8” (the height listed on that NYU sports bio to which I linked) but has a very long inseam that makes him appear much taller. He also wears boots with elevated heels to get him close to that 7’ mark.
There’s a long and colorful history of such height-based chicanery in the pro wrestling business; the case of Andre the Giant, sometimes billed at 7’4” but “only” a genuinely massive 6’10”, is a great one.
Being unlike what people expect is difficult regardless of the difference or expectations. This is an important essay. Thank you.
Thank you so much for this article ! Sending nice thoughts to your friend. He sounds like an absolute gentleman and I’d date him !