I want to remind my fans—yes, even the ones who can’t stand me—that being a little person is not an enviable situation.
My career now lets me live decently and comfortably. It wasn’t always like that. I sometimes read comments hinting that being “different” is an advantage, a neat “plus” in a world of look-alikes. As Ali likes to say: “Take a forty-foot step back.”
I strongly advise against trying to become a “little person,” even a famous one.
Being short isn’t just looking smaller in the mirror. It’s living in a body that runs on a different operating system—its own vulnerabilities, its own strengths. Morning bone aches. Knees that complain on every staircase. Walking that tires you too fast; running that earns a polite, awkward smile from onlookers. What amuses passersby translates, for us, into chronic stiffness, spasms, a constant reminder that our skeleton wasn’t built for this world’s default settings.
There are the quiet humiliations, too. They won’t make a headline, but they build a life: the ATM that stares down at you; the service counter where you vanish below the ledge; the restroom mirror that only reflects your forehead; the elevator button mounted just high enough to make you stretch like a tightrope walker. Simple gestures for you—repeated hurdles for us. Each time, the same mismatch, amplified by the look that arrives before any word and returns you to your difference.
In medieval courts, people with dwarfism stood at the foot of the throne. They made the powerful laugh. They had a place—decorative, subordinate, rarely that of the trusted adviser.
You might see a “little person” hopping in front of a ticket window to catch their bills, the line behind growing impatient—some avert their eyes, some snicker. Same social mechanism as before: a world cut to a Greek ideal that turns difference into spectacle. Yesterday we exhibited for diversion. Today we exhibit by sheer design oversight.
Professionally, the fight is just as relentless. You push not to be reduced to a caricature—the comic dwarf, the grotesque elf, the prefab tragic case. You argue for roles as full-scale men, not scaled-down models. You make the case—without the snicker behind the cape—that I can be a doctor, a cop, a lover. That I can carry a role with the same intensity as anyone. Condescension is rarely frontal. It wears a mask. It doesn’t speak loudly. It erodes—like water on stone.
Inclusivity isn’t a checkbox on a report. It’s daily work, a discipline: unlearning bias, undoing reflexes that box people in. Simple to say, brutal to practice—because it requires listening, really listening, and looking past the wrapper. It means noticing what I call the inner body. Our schooling, our social habits, our formatting pull us away from that attention. We will never scrub bias to zero.
But maybe we can start by knowing it’s there.
Leo Stillman
Illustration by Otto Machina — Leo Stillman is a fictional character from the series “After The Strong” English adaptation of “Car Ils Hériteront de la Terre”.