I took an assessment at the beginning and end of my time with Joyable, and though my use of “avoidance” actions—like procrastinating or skin picking—got better, my “spin” score—how socially anxious I felt—remained basically the same. Of course, it’s probably too much to expect all your anxious thoughts to be KonMari-ed into neat little triangles of reframed uplift within just a few months. Like a messy sock drawer, social anxiety was still going to happen to me on occasion. But I was grateful to learn some tools for managing it, both through Joyable and through some of the strategies employed by the people in this book. The emotional troughs seem less deep when you know others have climbed out of them, and that you might one day, too.

PART FOUR

TO STAY DIFFERENT, OR TO FIND YOUR OWN KIND?

Chapter 12

Staying

Michael Ain, the surgeon with dwarfism, specialized in surgery on children of short stature, fusing spines and straightening bowed legs under the round glare of an operating light. But there’s one kind of surgery he avoided doing if patients’ only complaint was their height: limb lengthening, the controversial procedure in which the bones are broken and spaced apart so they grow back longer. “Listen,” Michael would tell children of short stature, in his thick Long Island accent. “This is the way God blessed you, and you need to make the most of it.”

When he was twelve, Michael declined to get the operation himself. Why go through the pain, the risk, the months lost to recovery, he thought, just to be a few inches taller?

Michael’s take on the surgery highlights an interesting distinction between Little People in the United States and those in other countries. One 2012 study,320 for instance, compared the experience of Little People in Spain to that of Little People in the U.S. In Spain, Little People’s support organizations are relatively newer and more supportive of limb-lengthening surgery. The main Spanish organization in the study even promoted finding a medical “solution” to achondroplasia, a condition that causes dwarfism. In America, meanwhile, support groups tended to celebrate the identity of Little People and work to abolish things like “midget wrestling.”321 “[The American nonprofit] organizes a large annual conference with the aim of increasing contact among individuals with dwarfism,” the study authors write, “while [the Spanish group] organizes more technical conferences with medical experts to assist affected individuals and their families.”

Accordingly, limb-lengthening surgery was more popular among the Spanish Little People, according to the study. In the U.S., meanwhile, Little People drew their strength from being around other Little People—who, for the most part, hadn’t had the surgery.