Dacey Triplett’s Road To Godly Confidence As A Little Person
FERGUSON, N.C. — Dacey Triplett made the shot. At 13, she’d swung her basketball free throw with one arm and all the force of her 3-foot, 9-inch frame. Backboard, rim and straight through the net, to roaring applause.
Born with achondroplasia dwarfism, Triplett was about as tall as she would ever be.
“I completely missed the second shot, and I couldn’t tell you if we won that game or not,” Triplett, now 24 and 3 feet, 11 inches, said of that day. “All I knew was that I felt like I could do anything after that night. I was proud to be the me God created me to be in that moment.”
Triplett was growing into a young lady and, like most teens, comparing herself to others. Her torso was average height, but her arms and legs were short for her age. She perceived all the other girls would keep getting taller and, it seemed, get everything she ever wanted.
The type of dwarfism Triplett has occurs in only 250,000 people worldwide, but more widespread are the struggles she experienced getting to her current appreciation for being herself. She sees these struggles in much of society, exacerbated by the comparison culture of social media.
“I think social media has its really good perks. But I also think social media has opened up a new world of comparison that we’ve never seen before, because you are constantly seeing the highlights of everyone’s lives around you,” she said. “The other day, there’s this influencer I follow. She’s married with two kids and another one on the way. She has this little house and it’s so decorated, so cute. And she said at the end of the video that she’s only 22.
“And I was like, I am so behind. If she’s 22, I’ve got to get on it,” Triplett said. “I’m so happy with where my life is. God is just opening door after door right now, but it’s so easy for me to forget all of that.”
Triplett shares her journey to godly strength in her debut book, “Nobody Can Be You Better Than You: Loving the Person God Created You to Be,” which B&H Books released Oct. 13. She crafted her words to all of society, she told Baptist Press, not little people alone.
“I feel like an automatic assumption is that I’m writing just to other little people. And that is so far from the truth,” she said. “We’ve all looked in the mirror at some point and thought we wish something was different. We wish something looked different about us. We wish a personality trait was different. We’ve all wished we were different in some way at some point in our life. And so that’s my audience. My audience is everyone.”
Triplett long struggled to cope with the basic and not-so-obvious limitations of her stature. When a group of friends stood talking, she could never look them in the eye. If she hugged someone, she would perhaps reach their waist. She often needs a step stool in public settings. In the busyness of life, she sometimes just cuts a couple of feet off of jeans and rolls up her sleeves, not having time for alterations. She drives her car with pedal extensions and, while the implement is portable, she’s hesitant to drive vehicles other than her own.
“Like public bathrooms – I always tell people as a joke – those are my worst nightmares because I can’t reach the faucet a lot of times,” Triplett said. “Or the soap will be on the mirror, and my arms are shorter. So I might can reach the faucet, but I can’t reach all the way up there to reach the soap on the mirror.”
Triplett’s breakthrough began when a friend she considered the epitome of beauty and confidence spoke publicly about her own insecurities and shortcomings. Triplett was certain her friend couldn’t relate to her, because of their physical differences. But she learned they both internalized the same struggles, self-criticizing their appearance and struggling to eat a balanced diet without shame.
“The first few words she said was that she had a hard relationship with food and that she had struggled with body image for years. And I was like, that is crazy, that is insane,” Triplett said. “Because I was literally just sitting here wishing I was you, but we’ve had similar stories.
“And some of the words that stuck out to me the most,” Triplett said, “and honestly 360’d my relationship with Christ, was when she said, ‘I struggled for so long to have self-confidence because I didn’t have God confidence.’”
Triplett saw her personal error.
“Dacey, you are looking in the mirror at God’s creation and you’re not critiquing yourself. You didn’t make yourself,” she realized. “You’re critiquing God. You’re critiquing the artwork of God because God doesn’t make mistakes. He only makes masterpieces. When I realized that, that really changed my perspective on how I looked at myself and how I looked at others. Because like when you look at someone else, when you look in their eyes or when you notice their features, those are all handcrafted by Christ.”
Today, just shy of her 25th birthday, Triplett seamlessly commands a room with confidence when she enters. As the owner of Dacey Content Company, she promotes bluegrass and motorsports events, conducting multiple video interviews.
People look her in the eye when they speak.
Her work in the secular music and sports industry gives her opportunities to tell others about Christ, with confidence.
“And I always tell people, God was up there, hand-molding me. He didn’t accidentally slip and like squish me down a little bit. It was intentional. He intentionally made my clay just a little shorter because He knew the impact that it was going to have,” Dacey said. “One hundred percent, I think the Lord could have used me if I was 5-10 or 3-11.
“But from my being 3-11, from my having dwarfism, it’s given me a confidence I don’t know I would have ever had if I wasn’t who I am.”
This article was originally published by Baptist Press.
Diana Chandler is Baptist Press’ senior writer.