Since the age of 10 or 11 I've been struggling with accepting my height. One of the things people reccomended over the years was to be social, to go out and meet new people and be confident in doing that (to show that all of the negativity was just in my head, that nobody actually cares about your height).
Yesterday I went out, and I had two girls comment on my height in a negative way. The first one (she has for a week or two) has the need to constantly remind me that I'm short (even though I'm taller than her), calling me short and mocking me for it. The second woman gave me the age old compliment of telling a man that they look like a child, and subequently treating them in a patronising and condescending way as though they were a child (for some reason women like doing that to me).
What confuses me is that in the case of the first girl, I was with her boyfriend and two other friends and I was at most 2 inches shorter than the 2nd shortest guy: why is he an acceptable height yet I'm a height which means that girls have to mock me.
People say that height doesn't matter, and I believed that. Now I don't know whether I was stupid to believe that. I don't spend a lot of time with girls, and this thing has been one of the only times this year that I've gone out with a group of friends including a girl, and this is how she treats me for being short? Even her boyfriend said "Poor [my name]", pitying me, for being short or for being mocked, they were talking behind me and I was in a conversation when this happened so I don't know which.
I feel pretty crap and would like to stop feeling that way. If this is what I'll have to deal with everytime I meet a girl, then I have no idea how I'll continue tbh since it gets me down
(I'm 5'6, 18 but I've been "complimented" on looking 15)