On the responsibility of size

I have a friend who’s very large. He works as a bouncer, a fact that surprises nobody who meets him. In fact, I’ve literally seen people walk up to him on the street without any provocation and say, “Wow, you’re huge! Are you a bouncer or something?”

Despite my friend’s size and profession, he is a nerd, unsurprisingly given that he’s my friend. He runs Linux on his home computer and is great at trivia, especially as it pertains to geography. He’s also a very talented cosplayer.

He hasn’t been Totoro for a cosplay yet, but he has recently been Shrek, King of the Cosmos, and some obscure British cartoon character with a frighteningly huge nose.

Sometimes I try to get my friend to come with me to the sort of nerdy, Internet-adjacent events I like to go to, like rationalist meetups. He comes occasionally and has a good time meeting random Internet nerds. Still, most of the time he doesn’t come. I asked him why, once, and he said, “Because nerds are scared of me”.

I was tempted to disagree with him, but, to be honest, the fact is undeniable. Whereas some guys (often football fans) are enamored with my friend’s size, most nerds are not. I have gone to many nerdy events with him where people are scared to start conversations with him or avoid him altogether.

To be fair, this is not a ridiculous concern on their part. Not only is my friend huge, but he does work as a bouncer and used to fight MMA. He has been in many more physical confrontations than the average person. In terms of people who are physically dangerous at the nerd meetup by their very nature, he is in a rarefied group.

Still, it’s sad, and it doesn’t really make sense in the context of the meetup. My friend is no more likely to punch someone over a debate on AI or role-playing games than I am. What people perceive is that he’s just a lot more likely to seriously hurt someone if he does so.

Being aware of that perception is an innate part of my friend’s life, and has been since he was a large child. This awareness is sometimes a burden for him, like when he’s trying to ingratiate himself at an anime convention. It’s sometimes a blessing for him, like when he needs to bar a drunk from entering the bar or when he confidently accepts drinks from strangers at a club, because, “If they were going to pick anyone to rob, why would they pick me?”

But that perception is always there. And, because my friend is a reasonable human being, he adjusts his passage through society accordingly. He tries not to scare people or hurt people.

Sometimes I imagine, though, what would happen in some sort of body swap situation. If one of the nerds at the rationalist meetup, someone who’s been small and skinny their whole life, were to swap bodies with my friend and suddenly become huge. Perhaps it wouldn’t even have to be someone who’s actually all that small, but someone who was normal sized and just felt small, and always wanted to be huge.

Perhaps this body swap would be random, or perhaps it would be in response to 4 years of inflation and a severely miscalculated attempt to hold onto power and then pass it onto an unpopular, unelected, anointed successor. Regardless, I wonder if that skinny or normal-sized nerd would feel the same responsibilities of size as my friend.

Or, if they would take advantage of this body swap to suddenly act with the freedom they always wanted. I wonder if they’d go charging through crowds of people on the subway to rush to an open seat, parting people before them like Moses. Maybe they’d call out the drug addicts and alcoholics who stagger around Boston Common in the summer, and tell them they’d need to leave, implicitly threatening them in a way they couldn’t before. Maybe they’d just do stupid things, like cut in line at the supermarket and dare people to call them out. They’d probably feel much more liberated than my friend, much more comfortable to take advantage of people’s fear of them or ignore it when it was inconvenient.

I’m not saying it would all be a bad thing. I don’t think my friend leads a perfect life. He’s gotten overly rambunctious at parties. He enforces rules at the bar that I think are stupid, like the rule that no liquids can leave his bar to avoid people drinking on the street. There’s room for improvement.

But, overall, I think things could be a lot worse if he wasn’t so conscious of his size. I think someone who was very confident that they could use his physical attributes better than he could would be very likely to make things worse in direct proportion to how confident they were. And I’d worry that, no matter how well intentioned they were, they’d cause a lot of damage with their antics before they realized why my friend is so intensely aware of how people perceive his size.

But we’ll see, I guess. I might be wrong. After all, I’ve never been big.