The first time I realized I was different, I was five. Other kids played on the swings, but I couldn't climb up. When I asked for help, they laughed. "Too small," they said. "Like a toy."

At ten, I walked into a store with my mother. The cashier looked over my head and asked, "What does your little brother want?" My mother’s smile tightened. "He's my son." The woman’s eyes widened in surprise, then pity.

By sixteen, I had learned that the world didn’t make room for people like me. Clothes never fit. Strangers took pictures without asking. When I walked into a room, people stared—some amused, some curious, some uncomfortable.

"You're so cute!" a woman gushed at a wedding, bending to pat my head like I was a child. I was seventeen.

At twenty-one, I sat through a job interview where the manager smiled too much. "We love diversity," he assured me. "But… the nature of the job requires… someone who can, you know, reach things."

I could reach things. I just needed a stool. But they had already decided—I wasn’t enough.

Even friendships weren’t easy. Some people kept me around for laughs. Some avoided me entirely, afraid to say the wrong thing. And love? That was another battle. "I could never date a dwarf," a girl once told me, laughing, as if it was a joke I should find funny.

But I am not a joke.

I am not a mascot, a spectacle, or an inconvenience.

I am a person. And I am enough.