What to do while you wait for your growth spurt

Hey kids. Do you feel like all your friends have had their growth spurts already? Are your peers' voices cracking, leaving you the only boy capable of pulling off a soprano solo in your school choir? Are you overlooked at school dances because you can't seem to match the masculinity of stubble with your perfectly-shaped bowl cut? Don't despair. Many young men like yourselves have gone on to success, even if they were the only ones in their class who couldn't reach the top shelves of their lockers without receiving a boost from a friendly calculus teacher.

In the meantime, you're looking at a lot of years of embarrassment, torment and misery. But buck up! With these easy tips, you can turn your puberty from "emotionally scarring" to "like being tossed around by the waves in an angry ocean--just close your eyes, hold your breath and pray for it to be over" in no time!

1) Hope is not your friend.
Look. You're going to be small. I'm sure that, deep down, you know this. People will try to tell you that you're a "late bloomer" and that next year is the year you're really going to break out. In third grade, they well tell you that their son was short like you in third grade and by the time fifth grade rolled around, he was the tallest kid in his class. They will tell you that their nephew was short like you in seventh grade, but by the time he graduated high school, he was the fattest guy they knew. They will tell you that their friend's brother was short like you in eleventh grade, but by the time he got married, he had three kids from previous relationships and died of a heart attack in the middle of intercourse. They are lying.

You will grow only when your body is damn good and ready. And you won't end up taller than anybody else. People end up being tall because they start tall and then their height is encouraged by body-stretching activities like basketball and who the hell knows what else. If anything, your spine will become compressed after cramming yourself into all the things you end up cramming yourself into (lockers, gym bags, guitar cases) in your desperate search for approval from your tall friends. At best, you find yourself checking in at "average" a few years down the line. And you will savor it.

2) Find a "thing."
To help with the difficult adjustment of the college years, find an annoying quirk or affectation with which you can become identified. After all, you don't want to be "the short guy." It might not seem like an improvement to become "the guy who's always humming" or "the queer who wears a powdered wig," but at least you can control that (at least until it inevitably becomes
a compulsion and your palms sweat and you start having panic attacks whenever you leave the house without your cape).

3) Don't become resentful!
It's pretty easy to be a short kid who falls into the trap of hating everyone and everything around him for no good reason. It happens to even the best of us every now and then. But you don't want to be a bitter ball of hatred all the time. Every crowd needs a good-natured, wise-cracking short guy! You can be that guy! Make light of your own size, even when no one else is talking about it. You won't be liked, or accepted. But if you can take your obvious misfortunes in good humor, then you will be respected. And even if that doesn't come close to making you happy, it will be enough to deceive yourself into thinking you're satisfied enough to fall asleep at night.

4) Don't bother.
You will try a lot of crazy things to get bigger. You will try to stretch yourself out by hanging from the back deck. Too embarrassed to join a gym or ask for real equipment, you will do bicep curls with your mother's leg weights and bench press your saxophone case. You will go on reverse-diets, in which you will stuff yourself with food until you don't feel like moving, or you will make yourself milkshakes until your parents refuse to buy you anymore ice cream. And through it all, you will not grow an inch or gain a pound.

Think of your body like a machine. You need food as fuel--the excess is then added to the body in the form of fat or muscle. You may begin to think of your body, with its accelerated metabolism, as more of a black hole, into which matter is simply sucked before its components vanish and enter another dimension (nowhere near your chest, through which your ribs are still sticking out). But that's not the whole story. After all, it takes a lot of fuel to keep a machine going, especially when the machine is doing so much sighing and weeping and regretting all the time. Premature wistfulness burns a lot of calories! Unfortunately, there's nothing you can do until you're so beaten down that your soul just scabs over and you can't feel anything anymore.

Last but not least,
5) When you finally do grow, don't forget to stop acting like a short person!
After a lifetime of being the smallest person you know, all of a sudden, your puberty will zip by and you won't even take the time to enjoy it! Through your formative years you felt nothing but the kind of inadequacy that will never go away. There's nothing you can do about that. But that doesn't mean you can't pretend to have at least a modicum of self-respect. Your late start has past, which means now you're on a level playing field. Strangers will never know the difference! That attractive girl, that intimidating would-be mugger, that job interviewer--none of them know you were ever short. At least, they don't until you find yourself incapable of making eye contact or doing anything but mumble into your collar and try to excuse yourself as quickly as possible. When meeting someone new, just repeat to yourself, "this person does not know why I should be ashamed," and watch your self-confidence skyrocket! In a few years, you may even be having conversations with adults!