I was tooling through the local Super Walmart the other night around 9:30 PM to get some groceries and other odds and ends. I’m a reasonably large person at 6’3" and I’m used to looming over most other people in general social proximity. But that wasn’t happening last night.
I swear to God at least 25% of the men in that store were my size or larger and at least 50% were 6 feet or better. But that wasn’t the strangest part. The women were big too. Girls 5’10" to 6 feet plus were everywhere and that was without the huge heels in fashion currently.
I actually stopped and checked myself in a mirror to make sure some radioactive mist exposure wasn’t gradually shrinking me. I had a minor epiphany passing people my size around every aisle corner. This is what it feels like to be normal sized! It was a truly odd feeling. It’s hard to explain. Less pressure in one sense that I was just part of the average crowd and my bigness not stand out, but disturbing in another that my self image/identity is that of a large, powerful person and feeling relatively smaller and less powerful was vaguely dis-orienting.
It was probably just some random confluence of circumstances that so many large people were shopping at once at the same place but it made for an interesting night!