Vulnerability Bender

I've been on a vulnerability bender for the last month, and it feels like it's killing me sometimes.



It started with writing We Can Become Known in February, and then continued with a bunch of other pieces I've written since then, including I'm Speaking My Truth and Spreading the Word, Because It Does Get Better, and most days now it seems like a pretty good idea to stay in bed with some hot coffee and pretend that I just woke up on some other day a long time ago when I didn't feel so vulnerable.

I'm not depressed really. I'm just really broken open, like a soft meat seed pod that's been split down the middle, and the wind's having its way with redistributing my innards.

My anxiety about it all dresses itself up as shame burning up the back of my neck, and I feel consumed by self-doubt and self-loathing. It creeps in sometimes when I've been feeling open for too long. It's a self-defensive reflex. The scared voice inside me tells me that I'm bad, not because I am bad but because it knows I will stop and withdraw if I feel bad enough. I am afraid of being hurt.

The scared voice inside me is a little kid afraid of the dark. Growth and change redefines my boundaries, and the new limitations those boundaries map out make me feel naked, and not the good kind of naked.

I don't know if it's the moon or the planets or something I elicit when I give off a certain mood, but everyone was tossing their vulnerability around yesterday in a mad fit of self-exposure, and it was both poignant and distressing. I was busted open, I received emails from other people who were busted open, and even my Friday night junk food delivery guy was busted open. I've only ever seen him once before, but he told me how his cat of 15 years had died a number of years ago, and that he'd never had another because he didn't think his heart could take the weight of loving so much. I imagined taking the food delivery guy into my arms for comfort while I pressed the buttons on the debit machine.

I wrote for seven hours straight yesterday until I finally collapsed and cried in the dark, because it hurts to be human, and that was good, even when I punched myself in the hip to keep from wailing out loud next to my open bedroom window. It has been a long time since I cried like that. I needed to let off the steam. It puts trouble at rest to let it out to rabble-rouse once in a while.

The next step in my personal brand of self-therapy this morning, after putting this little number out there, is to have a shower, paint my fingernails bright red, and take the Palinode out for a late breakfast like regular human beings do. I can't lie around being an aching, busted open seed pod 24/7. I like food too much, and there's a red velvet cupcake with cream cheese icing that has my name on it.

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PS.  This is what I wrote exactly one year ago at Aiming Low: "Anxiety, Panic Attacks, And What Gets Us Through". Vive la annual révolution!

PPS.  I just got an email about something huge for me that has been a major part of this whole vulnerability breakdown, and it is wonderful, fabulous, good, really excellent news, which I'm not going to tell you about yet, because life's a bitch sometimes, and I would be remiss if I didn't contribute.

25 Things That Make Me Feel Vulnerable

1. Big men passing by me on the sidewalk at night
2. Staying sober
3. Going to the bathroom with the door open
4. Falling in love
5. Writing poetry
6. One of my molars breaking
7. Buying presents for people
8. Going barefoot
9. Thong underwear
10. Tax season
11. Having my photo taken
12. Flying in an airplane
13. Sex
14. Funerals
15. Bra fittings
16. Speaking in public
17. Showering when no one else is home
18. Cancer
19. Using our building's laundry room at night
20. Being unable to find my glasses
21. The downward drift of some of my body parts
22. Being touched
23. People crying in front of me
24. Watching the news
25. Telling people what I believe in

That Novocain Smile Says I DID IT

I know that I've become one of those bloggers over the last year since I quit drinking, the kind who seems to turn every event into a deeply meaningful experience that changes my whole life, but I'm telling the truth when I do it. Getting sober means waking up, and waking up means that I am seeing things with a degree of clarity for the first time in my adult life. It all feels so big and meaningful. In a way, I'm a teenager again, and life itself has become this consciousness raising experience.

Anyway, this is all just apologetics for what I'm going to write about going to the dentist, which I will keep short, because it's late, and I still have to pack for Blissdom Canada, and the final episodes of my Thirtysomething binge aren't going to watch themselves.



I had years of being beaten down by an abusive work environment and depression and health issues and alcohol abuse and not doing what in my heart I knew I should be doing because it meant making grand life changes like quitting drinking, so when I finally had the courage to quit drinking, I knew that staying sober meant not just being courageous about that one thing but being courageous about lots of things, because part of my habit of drinking was my habit of living under the thumb of my fear. On top of quitting drinking, I had to do things like come out as a blogger and speak in public and own up to my part in difficult situations and go to the dentist.

I did my best to put off going to the dentist, but then my filling fell out the other day, and the jig was up. Fucking jigs. They're always up.

So, I had to climb another of my Everests, only this time I almost believed I could do it before I did it. All of my other Everests have been leaps out into abysses I wasn't quite sure wouldn't consume me whole, but this one I kind of thought I could do.

It's an interesting thing, this starting to believe in myself. I don't know what to make of it yet, but it's interesting. I'm almost starting to think that I might be ready to knock the training wheels off, but I don't want to get too far ahead of myself. I mean, I haven't even figured what my training wheels are yet in this metaphor.



But I went to the dentist! And I lived! And not only that, but I knew I would follow through with it, and I kind thought I would make it through right from the beginning, and now I get to eat chocolate again without electric fire ripping along my nerves for minutes on end, and all for the low, low price of 584 dollars. Why my dentist isn't dripping in furs and diamonds, I have no idea.

Fillings Fall Out All Of The Time, The World's An Imperfect Place

I was walking down the street yesterday afternoon chewing this new gum I found. I like the flavour, but it made me think This must be what they mean when they say something sticks to dental work, because, man, it really seemed to be sticking to my dental work.

I threw out the piece I'd been chewing, poked around my teeth with my tongue a bit, and, lo and behold, this fell out of one of my molars:



I am terrified of dentists. I was terrified before a certain couple of bad incidents happened to me, but, afterwards, I was !!!TERRIFIED!!! in all-caps with exclamation points on both sides.

When I was in elementary school back in the early 1980s, we had dental hygienists who had offices right in the schools. One day, they called me out of class to go to the dentist, and all the kids in my class yelled Oooooo, which everyone did every time someone was called out of class to go to the dentist. They gave me three fillings in the lower right side of my mouth that day. It turned out that it was the wrong side of my mouth, because they called me back in the next day, everyone said Oooooo again, and they gave me three fillings on the lower left side of my mouth, where they were supposed to be in the first place. I guess they were looking at the slides backwards. Twice the fillings for half the fun! Jerks.

When I was 21, I went in to have the wisdom teeth on my left side pulled out. Freezing doesn't work very well on me, so more than ten needles into the procedure, my dentist — whose last name was Hertz, if you'll believe it — asked if I had money to cover laughing gas. The teeth were already partially lifted out from her repeated attempts in between needles, and so they had to come out. I didn't have any money, because I was both unemployed and uninsured at the time, so she had two assistants hold me down while she yanked those wisdom teeth out without freezing.

True fact: I know what medieval torture feels like.

As a result of what I would call PTSD, I have been to the dentist only twice in the last 17 years, which means that these fillings in my head are much older than that, which means that I am pretty sure the next dentist I see is going to suggest that we pull out all of my teeth and start fresh with a spanky new pair of synthetic chompers, which would be just fine with me.

I'm at the point where I hate having teeth altogether.

After that filling fell out yesterday afternoon, which is really only the last piece of a larger filling that I'm fairly certain has been falling out for a couple of years, I actually figured that it would be no big deal. I'm not all that attached to any of my teeth, especially one at the very back of my mouth, and I'd had no pain associated with it before this last bit fell out.

Oh, how very wrong I was.

That last bit was apparently the only thing standing between me and immense pain at the first sign of anything sweet. I found this out when I nearly hit the floor after sucking on the chocolate from a Kinder Surprise Egg later last night. The pain from that chocolate radiated forward from the back of my mouth straight through all the teeth on my upper right side for more than five minutes, which five minutes I spent gripping the counter and wondering where my pliers were. Even remembering that pain brings tears to my eyes.

I actually considered the possibility of pouring Krazy Glue or bathtub sealant in there, because what's wrong with a little chemical poisoning, but I've come to terms with the fact that terrified, impervious-to-freezing me really does have to find a dentist.

At some point.

I am more than will to give up sugar forever and wait for my nerves to kill themselves off. I am still exploring my options.

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UPDATE: I made an appointment for next Wednesday afternoon with a dentist based solely on a Twitter recommendation and the fact that the number 666 was in the phone number. I went by the logic that real evil makes attempts to cloak itself. Hold me.

25 Things Of Which I Am Afraid

See also my subsequent list, "25 Things That Make Me Feel Brave".


Bonus extra fear: what's under every manhole cover I step on.

1. I am afraid that we are just as smart as we think we are.
2. I am afraid that, when I finally do go to a dentist, they are going to have to do something, anything, to my teeth and/or gums.
3. I am afraid that I will die by freak electrocution if I bathe during a rainstorm.
4. I am afraid that I will have to spend my elder years living in a tent without electricity because we killed the earth.
5. I am afraid that something might be in my closet when the door is closed, but I feel insecure, as though I need to batten down the hatches, when the door is open.
6. I am afraid that I might be the only one who loves this hard.
7. I am afraid that, when I give blood, the little finger-pricker thing will be missing its spring and will stab me in the bone again like that one time in 1995.
8. I am afraid that I might not have my words when I need them.
9. I am afraid that there might really be ghosts in my apartment, and I just can't see them.
10. I am afraid that the Palinode will die before we have a chance to get very old together.
11. I am afraid that I will die before the Palinode and I have a chance to get very old together.
12. I am afraid that I will run out of my allotment of near death experiences.
13. I am afraid that I will get cancer again, because I had it too easy the first time.
14. I am afraid that, because my apartment building is old, I could fall through the floor into the basement at any moment.
15. I am afraid that I will never have a really restful, comfortable sleep again in my life.
16. I am afraid that I will never be great.
17. I am afraid that I will die in a plane crash.
18. I am afraid that I will become one of those old people who ends up forgotten and eating cat food until someone finds her body months later because I had no children.
19. I am afraid that someone will shut down the internet.
20. I am afraid that I will somehow end up unconscious in the hospital, and someone will decide to give me penicillin, and I will die before ever regaining consciousness.
21. I am afraid that I will never write books.
22. I am afraid that, if I do write books, they will be terrible, and I will look back on them years later with shame.
23. I am afraid that my adult acne will never go away, and I will be the only eighty-year-old still using zit cream.
24. I am afraid that I might be dysfunctional for not feeling sad about the inevitable lessening of the mass production of paper books.
25. I am afraid that, because my concern about my recent addiction to Thirtysomething on Netflix outweighs my nostalgic fear about the state of books, I am much more dysfunctional than I fear.