The nylon strap is biting into the soft tissue just above my hip bone, a persistent, dull ache that suggests I am the one who is incorrectly shaped. It is a peculiar kind of gaslighting, isn’t it? To buy a piece of equipment meant to facilitate safety and comfort, only to find that it treats your anatomy as an inconvenience. I am currently staring at a reflection in a hallway mirror, trying to adjust a rig that was clearly modeled on a plastic mannequin with the proportions of a Greek god and the flexibility of a G.I. Joe. My own body, however, is a collection of 53 different stubborn angles and a torso length that seems to defy the industry standard. I feel like an interloper in my own skin.

Yesterday, I walked head-first into a glass door. It was one of those moments where the transparency was too successful; I saw the path ahead, didn’t perceive the barrier, and my nose paid the price in a sharp, 33-millisecond burst of clarity. It occurs to me now that most gear design is a glass door. It presents a transparent promise of ‘universal fit,’ but the moment you try to move through the world as a non-standard human, you slam into the hard reality of a design philosophy that never actually accounted for you. We are told the gear is fine. We are told we just need to ‘break it in’ or lose 13 pounds or perhaps grow 3 inches of additional lumbar curvature. It is a lie of omission.

The Phantom User in the Engineering Room

Sky V., a hospice volunteer coordinator I work with, understands this friction better than most. Sky spends 43 hours a week navigating the narrow, emotionally charged spaces of patient rooms and family waiting areas. In her line of work, discretion isn’t just a preference; it is a fundamental requirement of the job. She needs to move-to kneel beside a bed, to reach for a box of tissues, to guide a grieving spouse toward a chair-without her equipment announcing its presence through a clunky ‘printing’ profile or a sudden, metallic creak. Sky doesn’t have the luxury of a ‘tactical’ build. She has a real build, one shaped by 53 years of life, a specific hip flare, and a height that puts her at a perpetual disadvantage with standard-issue belts and holsters.

I watched her struggle with a supposedly high-end holster system for 23 days before she finally tossed it into a drawer. The straps were too short for her torso, the cant was unadjustable, and the holster itself sat at an angle that dug into her ribs every time she sat down to document a patient’s vitals. It wasn’t that she was ‘too small’ or ‘too curvy.’ It was that the designer had a very specific, very narrow ghost in mind when they carved the mold. This phantom user is usually a 183-pound male with a 33-inch waist and zero percent body fat. If you deviate from this template by even 13 percent, the gear begins to fight you.

Design is a silent language that usually screams at the outliers.

The Statistical Myth of the Average

We often talk about ‘losing the genetic lottery’ when our bodies don’t match the airbrushed ideals on billboards, but the real loss happens in the engineering room. There is an arrogance in one-size-fits-all that borders on the pathological. In the mid-1943 era, the military tried to design stickpits based on the ‘average’ pilot. They measured 4,063 men and calculated the mean for every dimension. The result? Out of those thousands of pilots, exactly zero fit the average in all categories. Not one. By designing for everyone, they had designed for no one. The ‘standard’ human form is a statistical myth, a ghost that haunts our manufacturing plants and leaves people like Sky V. and myself wondering why our gear feels like a medieval torture device.

The Hidden Tax of Poor Design

When you are a hospice volunteer coordinator, your physical presence needs to be an anchor, not a distraction. Sky told me once that she felt like she was constantly ‘performing’ a body shape that wasn’t hers just to make the gear work. She would stand stiffer, walk more tentatively, and avoid certain sitting positions because her holster would otherwise shift into a position that was either visible or painful. This is the hidden tax of poor design. It’s not just the $73 or $123 you spent on the product; it’s the mental energy consumed by managing the failure of that product in real-time. It’s the constant checking of your hemline, the subtle tugging at your belt, the micro-adjustments that make you look nervous when you should look composed.

I’ve spent the last 63 minutes trying to find a configuration that doesn’t make me look like I’m carrying a small, angry badger on my hip. The frustration is visceral. You start to resent your own hips, your own stomach, your own shoulders. You think, ‘If only I were flatter here, or wider there, this would work.’ But that’s the glass door talking. The barrier shouldn’t be your body. The barrier is a lack of adjustability. A truly ergonomic tool doesn’t ask the user to change; it provides the mechanism to change itself. This is why I eventually pointed Sky toward Revolver hunting holsters, because at some point, you have to stop apologizing for your DNA and start demanding gear that respects the 233 different ways a human torso can bend.

We are not the problem; the mold is.

Asymmetry and Structural Integrity

I remember a conversation with a designer who insisted that adding more adjustment points would ‘compromise the structural integrity’ of the product. I told him that my own structural integrity was being compromised by his ‘perfect’ design. I have 13 different scars from various clumsy mishaps-including the glass door incident-and I don’t need my holster to add a 14th. We are asymmetrical creatures. We lean to one side when we talk; we carry more weight on one hip; our spines have 33 vertebrae that all want to move in slightly different directions. To ignore this is to fail at the very basic task of human-centric engineering.

The Goal: Disappearance and Presence

Sky eventually found a rig that worked, but it took an exhausting amount of trial and error. She had to learn the hard way that ‘universal’ is often code for ‘unimaginative.’ She now carries with a quiet confidence that was missing before. When she sits with a family, she is entirely present. She isn’t thinking about the 13 millimeters of plastic rubbing against her iliac crest. She is thinking about the person in the bed. That is the ultimate goal of any equipment: to disappear. If you can feel it, it’s failing you. If you have to think about it, it’s a distraction. If it hurts, it’s a design flaw masquerading as a personal shortcoming.

I find myself becoming increasingly militant about this. Maybe it’s the headache from the glass door, or maybe it’s just the 43 years of living in a world that seems to think ‘Medium’ is a universal constant. We need to stop accepting the ‘genetic lottery’ excuse. You didn’t lose a lottery; you were just sold a ticket for a game that was rigged from the start. Your body is a masterpiece of biological engineering, even with its 53 quirks and its occasional collision with transparent barriers. The failure lies in the hands of those who refuse to build for the beautiful, messy, non-standard reality of the human form.

The Revolutionary Act of Comfort

As I finally get this holster cinched into a position that feels-dare I say-natural, I realize that the tension in my shoulders has dropped by at least 23 percent. I can breathe without feeling a constriction. I can move without a shift in my center of mass. It shouldn’t be this revolutionary to feel comfortable. It shouldn’t be a surprise when something works for your specific shape. But until the industry catches up to the reality of the 8,003,003,003 different bodies on this planet, we have to be the ones who demand more. We have to be the ones who look at a ‘standard’ design and ask, ‘Whose standard?’ Because it certainly isn’t mine, and it certainly isn’t Sky’s.

In the end, we are all just trying to navigate a world full of invisible doors. Sometimes we hit them face-first, and sometimes we just get stuck in the frame. But the right gear-the gear that actually adjusts, that actually listens to the body it’s placed on-is the handle that lets us walk through to the other side without leaving a piece of ourselves behind. If you’re still fighting your equipment, stop. It’s not you. It’s the arrogance of the mold. And you are far too complex a creature to be defined by a piece of plastic that doesn’t know how to move when you do.