today I did a big thing: i went to the dentist.
trigger warning: talking about gross teeth stuff in the next paragraph. i will cease talking about gross teeth stuff after this one paragraph.
when I was in my early 20s, I had a very bad experience with a dentist, where she did straight-up sadistic shit to me… she was putting a veneer on my destroyed enamel and the teeth dust was flying all over the place and she was pretending it wasn’t happening and wouldn’t squirt the water in my mouth to help with the tooth dust. and she also filled a cavity but told me i wouldn’t need novocaine and then she hit a nerve and i involuntarily jerked in the chair and she was like “oh did that hurt?” while continuing to drill my tooth. and then she kept saying “do you eat a lot of lemons?” when it was like “no lady, who the f ‘eats a lot of lemons’? i just vomit frequently due to alcoholism and take a lot of opioids, leave me alone.” and then she tried to peer pressure me into zoom teeth whitening by trying to shame me about my not-white teeth (I am sorry but I have no desire to look like a newscaster with white chiclets for teeth????).
the last time i went to the dentist was 9 years ago, and nothing horrible happened but it was still horrible and i hated it and i have not been able to bring myself to go to the dentist since.
i tried to go to the dentist 1.5 years ago but had a horrible panic attack and left and then sobbed/hyperventilated in the car and it just felt humiliating, that i couldn’t do this simple thing of taking care of my teeth.
so last winter, i made an appointment with the nice dentist in town that everybody likes (including chris and kati, who sometimes read this substack, hi kati and chris, if you read this) and i had to wait 6 months but yep today i did it.
i asked scott to take me because i was too scared to go alone so he took me and waited in the raleigh mall (a glorious place, which is stuck in 1988, has a bunch of plants inside and a fountain and still smells like decades of cig smoke) and read.
the dental hygienist was very sweet and talked to me like a baby and told me it was OK to be afraid and gently explained everything she was doing.
and a very surprising thing happened: nobody said to me “wow, you’re a real POS and you need $10k dollars of root canals and cavities filled and you totally ruined your teeth by doing drugs.” I had no cavities and the only thing wrong with me is I have TMJ. So now I will go back in 3 months for a cleaning and she told me they will numb me up so I won’t feel it and I should bring headphones so I can’t hear it, and my brain can deal with that— i don’t have to feel it or hear it. I will overcome my fear of the dentist!
my dentist phobia is from that evil dentist but it is also very clearly rooted in addiction-related shame, which is crazy to me— i’ve been sober longer than i used drugs, yet it still has this imprint on me.
But I can open my mail now. That was another residual addiction thing— I’d just let my mail sit there and either throw it away after a while, or maybe Scott would open it and pay whatever bill for me. Now I open my mail. I am also no longer irrationally afraid of the police.
So I just have my dental phobia, and then the fear that I am going to be “found out”… My brain doesn’t elaborate on or explain what I will be “found out” doing… maybe I think that somebody will randomly accuse me of being on drugs and I will have to convince them that I am not. This causes me to panic when I am “late for work” (my office hours start 1 hour before class begins and literally nobody cares if I am a little late to my office hours) or ask permission for things I don’t need permission for (like teach a nighttime Zoom class from home so I don’t have an 11-hour work day).
Phew! Shame is a hell of a drug and the brain is a wild place.
Thank you to my darling husband for taking me to the dentist and opening my mail.
here is a pic I found on Reddit of the mall:
the Raleigh Mall is not actually called the Raleigh Mall anymore. it is the Beckley Plaza now, but Scott calls it “the Raleigh mall” so that is how I refer to it. It was the biggest shopping center in ye olden days but now everything in it is pretty much owned by the same people… the dentist is Harvey Dentist and there is also Harvey Wigs (??) and the Harvey medspa, which is where I go sometimes for vampire facials.
The Harveys are my cousins. My great grandmother was a Harvey, and the owners are my grandmothers' first cousins. That's where I go to the dentist as well. Also, the Raleigh Mall was a separate mall. It's across Eisenhower Drive where Harbor Freight and Dunham's is now. Plaza Mall has always been Plaza Mall.