Sometime earlier this week I chipped by front tooth. It didn’t hurt, but it played with my mouth feel and I kept thinking I had a hair stuck between my teeth. With my beard and moustache, that’s not an unlikely scenario. So I called my old dentist and managed to get an appointment for this morning.
My history with dentistry and orthodontia is not pretty. While many of my classmates got those cool glue-on braces with colors, I got full bands on every tooth, had to wear a retainer 24 hours a day, and my teeth to this day have clear lines where the braces sat. My orthodontist didn’t like my squirming during tightenings and would thump my sternum to get me to calm down.
As an adult, usually because of financial constraints, I stopped going to the dentist. I have had spurts of regular appointments, but then go for years between visits. I have created for myself the emotional equation that Dentist=PAIN or worse, Dentist=BANKRUPT.
So I spent most of yesterday scared, and it only got worse once I made the appointment. It was no longer a thing I could avoid.
Like most people, I don’t like to live in fear[1]I’ll have to qualify that statement if I ever get around to discussing victimhood as a lifestyle. I don’t even like to use the phrase “I’m stressed” because unless I’m lifting several hundred pounds, it’s not stress I’m feeling, but fear, and fear, in theory, I can deal with. Yesterday’s fear wasn’t going away.
I talked to the smartest and wisest person I know. My wife told me I was being irrational and it wouldn’t bankrupt us and I’d feel much better once it was all over. Of course she was right, but in the moment I couldn’t escape the fear.
I even posted a question about this to Reddit and got a decent answer (and someone who told me to take CBD, which I still consider GETTING STONED, so no, not a good idea). I managed to sleep remembering something I picked up from the Art of Manliness:
Emotions are information, not instructions.
Greg Lukianoff, co-author of “The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure.”
I suspect it was the talking about the fear that helped. Quantifying the fear allowed me to pull a Sarah-to-the-Goblin-King on it:
You have no power over me.
Sarah, in Labyrinth
I had my teeth cleaned, which took a long-ass time and I think at least one chisel lost its edge in the work, but I endured. The chipped tooth stopped bothering me. They took x-rays and found a host of things to fix, which wasn’t a surprise, and I’m going back tomorrow for part of the work, and then next week for even more work.
But now I am not afraid.
Digressions
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