Fuel from Mary Carns and Halftank Studio

My teeth kept the score

I live with regret every time I go to the dentist, but not for the reasons you'd think.

Picture this: I'm driving home on a sunny afternoon, taking the scenic route to avoid the interstate. Nothing dramatic is happening. Just another day at a particularly dysfunctional startup where sprint planning sessions regularly devolved into shouting matches and physical threats, in an office that had been renovated with all the cubicle walls removed — an acoustic fishbowl where you could hear exactly which teams were almost coming to blows.

Then, in the middle of that ordinary drive, I felt my teeth move.

Not metaphorically. Literally. They felt like they were about to fall out of my mouth, shifting in real time from years of stress-induced clenching.

You'd think that would be the wake-up call. Reader, it was not. I drove home, had dinner, and went back to work the next day. And the day after that. And the day after that.

I was in complete denial about my teeth moving in my mouth as I was driving. I thought that there was no way that actually happened.

The bill came due

The Invisalign was the last step in a years-long repair project. Almost all of my teeth had cracks that needed to be meticulously filled. I had two gum grafts. The dentist who did them paired me with a toothbrushing tutor, because my mouth needed to be clean enough not to reject the new tissue. I also needed help brushing my teeth because no one really taught me. Humbling.

The headaches that radiated into my upper back — the ones I'd been treating as ordinary — didn't disappear until my bite was finally corrected. This was after years of pilates and cortisone shots and ibuprofen and enough dental work to cost about the same as a new car.

While the executives at that company drove their Mercedes and Lexus SUVs to their second homes in Virginia wine country on weekends, I was spending the equivalent of their fancy car payments on my mouth. Filling cracks. Closing gaps. Buying back the structural integrity that all those silent meetings had quietly extracted.

This time wasn’t all gloomy. I not only learned to brush my teeth properly, I also learned how to travel with a toothbrush and toothpaste. One thing I remember from my first trip to Paris a few months after I started Invisalign was not to be afraid of brushing my teeth in teeny tiny cafe bathrooms.

The lie my elders told me

I grew up hearing that desk jobs were the safe ones. Healthier than physical labor. No straining your back, no wearing out your knees, no breathing in factory air.

After over two decades of working as a digital designer, I'd like to file a formal objection.

All that sitting and stewing, going through one anxiety attack after another until you start to think it's normal — that wrecks your body just as thoroughly as physical labor does. It just does it in places no one talks about. Your jaw. Your gut. Your neck. The base of your skull. Your body becomes a pressure cooker with no release valve, and it finds creative ways to vent.

The injuries from physical labor at least come with a clear story. I lifted something heavy. I fell off a ladder. The injuries from a hostile workplace come with a story your dental insurance doesn't recognize. I sat in a meeting where a software architect told me "no one cares about the design" and I didn't snap back. I clenched my jaw instead. For four years.

For me it wasn’t just teeth. All that weight I was carrying around even though I worked out religiously? The nausea I would get before giving a presentation? My hair falling out? All symptoms of the same stresses.

The honest math

I wish I could say that I recognize that I was wrecking my body and quit to do something completely different. I can’t.

I stayed. Even after the teeth moved. The medical insurance was free for me and my husband. The 401(k) was two years from being fully vested. We were trying to save for a house in an area where starter homes ran over half a million dollars. The stock options were almost certainly worthless, but "almost certainly" is not the same as "definitely."

So the question I was actually asking myself, every morning, wasn't can I be my best self here? It was, can I afford to leave?

For a long time, the answer was no.

That's the part of the "your body is talking to you, listen!" advice that always rings hollow. Bodies talk to you all the time. Bodies also get overruled by health insurance, mortgages, and the math of pre-existing conditions. Telling someone to listen to their body without acknowledging the cost of acting on what they hear is cruel.

What I can say honestly is this: my body was keeping a ledger I couldn't read at the time, and the bill arrived later, in the form of dental work that cost more than some of my coworkers' cars. The ledger was always going to come due. The only variable was how much it would cost by the time I finally paid it.

A small, useful thing

I’m not a certified pilates instructor anymore, but if you're reading this here’s a quick exercise: if you are clenching your jaw right now, unclench it. Drop your shoulders so that they are as far from your ears as you can get them. Take one deep breath, inhaling from your nose, exhaling from your mouth.

That alone is not the answer. The answer is more complicated and involves your finances, your insurance, your stage of life, and how much runway you can build. But that breath is free, and it's a start.

The rest of the work is figuring out how to read your own ledger before the bill arrives.

My ledger measured how much physical pain I was in and what I was willing to endure to stay in it. Does this sound familiar to any of you? Does this sound like someone else you know? Forward this to someone who needs some self-care.

— Mary

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