25 Ways You Can Know for Sure that You're Tall and/or Gangly

How can you know for sure that you’re tall and gangly? Well, since I'm an expert, I can teach you. Here are 25 signs that all point in that direction:

1. You’ve stood in the back row of every elementary school class photo since you were old enough to internalize the fact that the comma comes after every third digit in a written-out number (100,000,000,000,000,000 = aka “one hundred quadrillion”).

2. You somehow always seem to be the person geographically on the far-left or far-right of a group photo with your friends, and all the rest of your friends are shorter than you, and your natural tendency is to pose in a leaning-inward stance, and then you look at the photo after it is developed or “posted,” and you’re like, It is definitely possible that I could’ve looked slightly less awkward in this picture. Next time, remind me to insist on standing in the center, and all the shorties can just gather around me.

3. You can mount a horse just as masterfully as Legolas does in the Lord of the Rings movies – every time.

4. You cannot find pants long enough for your incredible inseam in any physical store anywhere; online is your only hope.

5. All pants in the stores are capris on your body.

6. You are frequently asked if you can please reach something from a high shelf or cupboard, OR you are asked if you perchance have the ability to reach waaaaaay far down behind the couch or waaaaaay far back underneath the couch to retrieve a stray-yet-not-unimportant small object, and you’re like, Have you seen these arms of mine? With these arms, I am the superhero you seek. Hashtag: Ganglyness FTW.

7. Virtually every long-sleeve shirt within any given 15-mile radius of you would be three-quarter-length shirts if you were to try them on.

8. You sometimes can sport a killer block when you play front row during volleyball games, if you aren’t a killer vball player already, which you can be – follow your dreams (if vball is your dream)!

9. Your wingspan is longer than you are tall. You are a wide rectangle in this way.

10. Speaking of your wingspan, it legitimately is practically as long as Team USA swimmer Michael Phelps’s wingspan is, and his wingspan is crazay babay.

11. You can’t touch your toes. Hashtag: Fail.

12. You can’t successfully sit down on the ground in the form of the letter “L,” where your core, shoulders, neck, and head are the Y axis, and your legs are the X axis. You can’t keep your legs straight, close together, and flat upon the floor whilst simultaneously keeping your upper body perfectly vertical. Maintaining—let alone acquiring—a perfect geometric right angle at the point where your Y and X axes meet is utterly impossible. This is the problem of people who are all leg and no torso.

13. Your younger, less-mature self has been irked multiple times when you saw your super tall crushes pursue and date girls who were vertically challenged in major ways. You felt gypped, and you felt the pain of all your fellow tall gal friends who also had crushes on tall guys who chased the short chicks. You’re grown up and past that angst now. Hopefully. Maybe.

14. Every now and then you feel self-conscious about your height, but then your friends who are not as tall as you rave about how much they wish they could be as beautifully tall as you. Your height is stunningly radiant! Fact!

15. You tend to duck a little bit when you find yourself in restroom stalls or wardrobe-changing stalls whose walls appear to be – um – insufficient.

16. You hit your head on the car ceiling when you get in and out. Hashtag: Owiiiiieeeee!!! Mommyyy!!!

17. A plethora of pointless human tricks are cinchily accomplishable by you, due to those squid tentacles that you endearingly call “limbs.”

18. When you do a handstand, you are 10 feet tall.

19. When you try to dance hip hop, you actually just look like a … well … a squid.

20. You have something in your hand that a kid – or even a grown adult – wants to swipe from your hand, and all you have to do is raise your arm straight up, and immediately the struggle is over. Unless they begin to wrestle you. Then you’d better pray you have buff muscles.

21. Two words: slam dunks. Unless u ain’t skilld like dat.

22. Remember in junior high and high school when the dress code was such that if you wanted to wear shorts, they had to be “fingertip length”? Yeah, well, then my shorts always went to my knees.

23. Your nicknames, when you were a kid, included “Jolly Green Giant” and “Big Bird.” In my life, my favorite was “The Alisaurus Rex.”

24. Your legs dangle off the edges of motel beds.

25. If you are a gal, you are intensely careful when it comes to deciding when to wear platforms or heels. Especially if you are on a date with a guy who is precisely your height or ever-so-slightly shorter. What if you are in heels and you want to kiss him or he wants to kiss you? Suggestion: smooch while sitting down.