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Health

The Ups and Downs of Being a Little Person

"People stare, point, and a whisper a lot. I'm a lot better at dealing with it than I used to be—there have been times when I didn't want to go out for fear of being mocked."

Ingvild with her brother and sister. Courtesy of the Fischer family.

This article originally appeared on VICE Alps.

You'd think that in 2015 anyone would be aware that calling short people things like "midgets" and "goblins" is more than a little offensive, right? Well, believe me—it happens. I'm fully aware that it isn't usually out of malice but it definitely doesn't make the words any more appropriate.

For short people, climbing stairs can become an extreme sport, you have to possess a flawless aim just to throw your letters into postboxes, and ATMs, well, they're just out of the question. These factors make you realize just how important height is in your everyday life.

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Ingvild Fischer knows this. She is herself one of the 10,000 little people living in Austria. She's also the secretary of a group called Federal Organization for Little People and their Families, or BKMF Austria. The following is a retelling of Ingvild's perspective.

A lot of folks are unaware that terms like "dwarf" and "midget" are often offensive. They've usually picked up the words from their parents and use them without knowing that they shouldn't. I've heard these things so many times that I've lost count. I've had kids stop me on the street and called me things like Lilliputian—the mythical tiny people from Gulliver's Travels. Of course I don't like to be compared to a character from a 1720s book. Would you be? I'm a human, too. A smaller one than you, but still a human. No, I can't fly or make myself invisible or anything of that nature. Unfortunately, I don't possess any magic powers.

I'm 4'5" and was born with a condition known as achondroplasia—the most common of the the 640 possible causes of dwarfism. Achondroplasia is a genetic defect that causes your arms and legs to shop growing while your upper body continues to. So actually, if I'm sitting, you can't really tell that I'm short. You can actually spot this "defect" during pregnancy and in Austria it's still legal to abort such a child right up to eight and a half months into the actual pregnancy. Which I think is crazy.

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The association I work for is strongly opposed to that. We offer both help and advice to parents expecting a child with achondroplasia. I understand that it must be an overwhelming feeling to be told that your child is going to grow up like this, but so what? There are countless examples of short people leading lives just as happy, if not happier, as anyone else.

Our organization is made up of people of all sizes—regular-sized parents with diminutive kids, diminutive parents with regular-sized kids. There's no "common situation," really. It's always different. And guess what? They're all happy.

My short stature was noticed relatively immediately after birth and although it hasn't always been easy, my childhood was actually great. I grew in the countryside so I guess I was quite sheltered. Things were good—I played with local kids, hung out with my siblings, the usual.

I never saw my size as an issue until I went to school. Sure, I understood that I was different, but had no idea that people would think I was that different. It was only after my height was repeatedly commented on that I began to notice something was wrong. I began to see kids looking at me out of the corner of their eyes.

Adolescence was tough. I stood on the sidelines and watched on as all my friends started to form their first relationships. It was really hard for me to find someone because of my height. In the end, I managed to find the right guy—who later became my husband. He's at 4'5" too.

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Some members of our association are even shorter than me and my husband. People mistake them for children and pat them on the head and stuff. Imagine how patronizing that feels. To be a grown-up human being and have other adults treat you like a child.

That's sort of the problem, people let your height taint their view of you as a human. The workplace is a prime example. All of your colleagues tend to underestimate your abilities because you aren't as tall as them. They figure you won't be as good at your job as they are. Employers need to learn that as long as the office is accessible to us, we work just as well as any tall person does. You don't need to treat us like children.

Daily life can be a bit of an issue sometimes. Really banal things can become an obstacle. Everything is made for regular-sized people so there's tons of things that are just unreachable. Take, for example, shopping carts. They're almost impossible for me to drive. Even when I can drive them, I need to get help to reach things on the top shelves. Sometimes you just don't have the energy to keep asking people for help so you either don't buy the product or you get to climbing.

Speaking of climbing—stairs can be quite an arduous adventure that can leave gasping for breath. ATMs are a drag, post boxes might as well be towers, but the worst of all—elevator buttons. Whoever decided to place them vertically is just evil. It basically means that I always have to get out of the elevator halfway up because I can't reach the top button. Can't someone fix this?

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Clothes used to be almost impossible to find in my size and when I finally managed to find some, they were covered in Mickey Mouse drawings. Thankfully, the internet has fixed all that.

At 135 centimeters, I'm one of the bigger little people. In general, the smaller you are, the harder you have it. I know people who are 80 cm and I can't begin to imagine what difficulties they must face.

I still get a lot of attention when I'm out in public. People stare, point, and a whisper a lot. I'm a lot better at dealing with it than I used to be—there have been times when I didn't want to go out for fear of being mocked. These days, I just ignore the stares—I am what I am and I don't feel like justifying myself anymore. I only really notice because my friends get weirded out when it happens. I'm probably oblivious to it by now.

People of my nature are often offered stereotypical roles in movies. Sometimes they're looking for cute little people, sometimes they're after creepy ones. Rarely anything outside of those two. Our association gets all sorts of calls looking for "dwarf characters." It's really a tricky subject because people don't want to be exploited but it pays pretty well.

I used to wonder why I was born like this—I couldn't make sense of it but today I'm actually thankful for it. I guess my faith in God helps me through it. I hope that some day society can stop seeing us as abnormal and starts to meet us halfway—at least in terms of accessibility. At the end of the day I'm just as much part of the population as anyone else and have just as many needs, feelings, and aspirations as any other human.

I'm not some creature from a fairytale land—all I want is an elevator where I can reach the top button.

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