Stand Tall

Modern life doesn't exactly encourage an upright perspective. Good posture, however, has the ability to change not just our stance but our entire outlook. Thessaly La Force takes note. 

- Jack Davison.

IF YOUTH IS WASTED ON the young, then height is wasted on the young and tall. I can recall with total clarity my disappointment in my sixth-grade class portrait. I had experienced a growth spurt that summer. I had always been tall, but now the fact of my height was unavoidable—a topic among relatives, teachers, even strangers at the grocery store. I had picked out my outfit that day with care. But the school’s photographer assigned me to the back row, next to the tallest boy in the class—such cruel fate! From then on, I had only contempt for my height.

My solution was to hunch. To shave even just a few inches from my stature, I’d slink to my classes with my shoulders rounded forward and my head down. Later, I spoke to boys with my body awkwardly tilted against a wall or, preferably, sitting down. This was the late ’90s in Northern California. There were no deportment classes, no one telling me to stand, as my mother’s generation did, with my shoulders back and chest out. If anything, the pervasive look and feel of grunge and the laid-back cool of California’s surf and skate culture only further reinforced my decision to slouch. There was a rebellion to slouching, an insouciance to bad posture that felt in tune with the bleached-out, tomboyish femininity of the world around me.

Eventually, I grew out of it. I discovered that my height was something of an asset. I started a career, got married, had kids. Motherhood finally allowed me to feel a purpose with my physical self that wasn’t tied to vanity. The only problem was that I had completely obliterated my posture. Years of rounded shoulders had taken its toll. Two pregnancies had stretched out my core. The decades spent working in front of a computer hadn’t helped either.