A New Record in Life

Look at me writing 3 times less than a year, go team!

I’m always amazed at how much writing does for my mental health. It’s been a wild and expensive year since my last stint back in July 2022 and there’s a lot to really digest. Just like sleeping helps your brain chemically adjust, I feel like writing has a similar effect of releasing things that I’m holding onto, things that I haven’t figured out how to deal with yet or even things that I am dealing with but can’t think myself out of.

Also a lot of you just give great advice.

It’s difficult though because I see myself in this position of great, great privilege and still finding things to complain about like “Shame on you!” which leads to this brutal cycle of not validating my concerns or puts me into a position of living my life not for me. Which in some factor is what parenthood is, but not completely.

It’s all very complicated. On one side of things, I still feel like I’m 20 at heart, like I never grew past that age, but I know that the wisdom I’ve gained from 20 to 40 years old is best noticed when I’m dealing with people who are just entering their 20’s. For all of the flaws of my previous job, I really enjoyed having the opportunity to mentor young adults who were transitioning from teen to, well, young adults. And my god is it so much harder for them to succeed now than it was for me. Like these people are barely affording groceries or housing (Hi fellow Canadians) and here we are surviving and change on a single income with 2 kids. Granted one isn’t in daycare (BECAUSE THEY DON’T EXIST APPARENTLY) and that will change things but being unskilled labourer, any money I make will be going directly into paying for that so it seems moot but also 30k is 30k, even if it’s spent before you make it. It’s all very complicated.

I seem to be in a fury of passions lately. Maybe I’m avoiding dealing with the vasectomy after the tests came back “inconclusive” (Annoying. So annoying) Or finally dealing with my dental health is tearing down a proverbial dam that I’ve set up internally so that I have to face that demon before I move into the castle and actually enjoy life a little bit. I’m currently recovering from a Skin Graft in my mouth to help deal with some receding gumlines and let me tell you, despite that it’s “Not that bad” it sucks. I got a row of stitches on the roof of my mouth and a wad of skin on the inside of my bottom two front teeth all with the question of “Is it taking? or Will I have to go through it again?” I can’t imagine what’s going to happen if it doesn’t take, do they just rip out the flesh and cut open the other side of my mouth?

I see this all as penance for what I’ve chosen to do to myself by not maintaining good oral health. Man let me tell you, anyone who’s reading this and maybe not taking the best care of their oral health, fucking do whatever you need to do to get on that horse. I cannot express enough how expensive and shitty this all is to deal with. But I KNOW I gotta deal with this, I KNOW I’m going to be dealing with this for the rest of my life and I KNOW that it’s one of those things that only gets worse if you don’t deal with it. It’s not like without professional intervention that my mouth will just recover and everything will be dandy, nah, it’s gotta be done. And, the end is nigh! but not in the doom-bad-no-good way, but in the “I’m almost at the end of the journey” sort of way (Even though that doesn’t sound a whole lot better if you got your gloom goggles on.) Next up is Invisalign and then whitening and I should be on a maintenance schedule from there on in. I am wholly unprepared for the emotions that finishing this will stir up.

Coles notes back story: When I was 16 I had my wisdom teeth taken out and my jaw broken and moved to fix something with my bite, over, under, I can’t remember now, but it was a terrible point my life. I was being bullied at school, I had just been kicked out of living with my dad (who I idolized, despite all his flaws) while he dealt with a mental health crisis (Something I didn’t know at the time) I was really struggling with thinking anyone loved me, that anyone even wanted me around. This started at 13 when I was sent to live with my mother and by 16 it was fully ingrained in my identity and having my jaw wired shut over Christmas only made it worse. It was a really dark time for me personally and it was at that point that I really started to debate suicide and make plans and all that grim-dark edgy shit that comes with that conversational topic but when it came down to it, I couldn’t do it. So. What I had decided at that point in my infinite wisdom was that I’d actively start making choices that guaranteed I wouldn’t live a long life. It started with completely ignoring my mental health, made easier by a shitty dentist who called me Lazy and Dumb and Stupid, all of which were accurate but maybe not the best way to approach me at the time as that’s basically all anyone had called me for the majority of my life up until that point, and to this day is on my red-card list of things I’ll never say about people. People can may stupid choices, but calling a person Dumb or stupid implies that they have no redeeming qualities and I just don’t like how that doesn’t give them any chance. ANYway. After ignoring my oral health I got older and entered into the world of culinary where I started drinking heavily and thus hangovers and vomiting and drugs etc etc etc.

Regardless, ignoring my oral health was the primary choice that I made that lead to a decade of bad oral health and addictions and when I turned… 32, I had been with this very strong willed woman who was one of the first to try and lift me up out of it and I started the journey of dealing with it, all waves hands around wildly of it. Now I’m 39 and at the tail end of this and the point of that whole flashback is understanding that there’s gonna be some emotions when I get myself back on track, some big fucking “Denied for 20 years” emotions. It’s gonna be wild.

But. I wonder if it will change anything?