This was challenging to write, and it might be one of the most personal things I’ve ever worked on. It’s far from perfect, but it’s the truth, and I suppose that’s got to count for something. I’m a little bit afraid to be sending it out. Here’s to getting back into the world — always scary, and certainly worth it. 🎈
A week before Halloween I drive up to Greenhills and trudge in the wet heat to the office of a dentist I’ve never met. Greenhills is dead and everything is gray, or at least it looks that way on this particular Tuesday morning. It’s late enough to be blistering out but too early for the lunch rush. I park by the cinema and amble towards this building I’ve never been, ducking under telephone wires and hopping over sewage puddles on the way. The building is old. Its fusty lobby looks like it hasn’t been touched since the early ‘90s, grubby Christmas wreaths and twinkling lights already strung up on the walls. My orthodontist is sending me to this doctor because I’ve been having problems with my jaw. I’m nervous he’ll tell me something is wrong and it can’t be fixed.
My orthodontist is indiscriminatingly warm like golden retrievers are indiscriminatingly warm. The first time we met, I was sitting in his waiting room when he hollered my name from inside his office with the kind of jovial familiarity you’d expect from someone who had known me my entire life—not a stranger I had never even set eyes on. A couple of weeks before this trip to Greenhills he had handed me a slip of paper with this new doctor’s name, rattling off his credentials like a proud uncle. It was sort of sweet, but I didn’t understand what any of it meant. Esoteric jargon and cumbersome acronyms, all lost on me. I wondered if perhaps it was the sort of thing that might just be a big deal amongst dentists and dentists only. Maybe if I were also a dentist I would have been more appropriately impressed.
The TMD doctor enters through the plastic curtains that hang over every doorway in this tiny dental office, the kinds of plastic curtains you see in warehouses or sci-fi movies. I’m sitting in a faded green dental chair. Across me, an air purifier whirrs, nestled in between this room and another like it. The rooms — cubicles? — are separated by a thin sort-of-wall that’s more like a partition with shelves, rising up from the floor but not actually attached to the structure of the building. There are tea-colored stains on the ceiling.
In a gentle voice he asks, How can I help you, Miss Colet and I tell him about the problems with my jaw and my bite and how everything has always felt sort of off somehow and how I feel like I’m just constantly making things worse, in little ways that might add up someday.
He has a benevolent face, I can tell. Even though he’s wearing two face masks and glasses and a plastic face shield over all of it, I can see he has kind eyes. He listens patiently. I tell him about the grinding at night. There’s the night guard I broke through, and the second one that’s already starting to chafe. He continues to nod and listen and I’m starting to feel ridiculous, rambling on about how I feel like I need to hold my face in place all day because if I let go, it looks and feels all wrong, and maybe there’s a problem with my bite. Maybe I fucked up last time, when I told my other dentist that the molars on my left side didn’t line up, and maybe because of my miscalculation she shaved them down too much. He asks about my orthodontic history and I’m mad at myself all over again for not having worn my retainers when I had to. Now it’s too late and they no longer fit.
He is being so nice and I can already hear how trivial it all sounds. I have been worried for so long about all this stuff that just feels stupid to be telling an actual doctor about. In the end we spend an hour in consultation, and he explains to me the mechanics of the body. The way the jaw moves; how it interacts with the spine, the teeth, the skull. How the things I thought were all wrong are simply versions of functional movement; in other words, what’s supposed to happen. I do have a problem, it turns out, but it’s common and not severe. He points out the scalloping on my tongue, the lines on the insides of my cheeks.
These formations are not normal, he says, and this is how I can tell you grind your teeth in your sleep.
But I can open and close my mouth, I can chew and talk, nothing locks shut or jams agape, at least not permanently. He tells me his patients would wish to be in my shoes, except he says it more like he wishes it for them. I wish my patients’ problems were more like yours. He seems good. As he demonstrates constructions on an anatomical model, he is saying everything is going to be alright, nothing is quite as bad as I think.
Before I leave, he tells me that my orthodontist was his professor at university. That’s how he knows him. With reverence, my TMD doctor says, Dr. B’s the best, he’s a pioneer in the field. He just doesn’t talk about it but he is.
He refers to some arcane dental term that I don’t understand but his eyes are shining and I know what he’s trying to tell me is that he looks up to my orthodontist. He’s honored he sent me here. So I try to seem impressed, to show him that this thing that means so much to them, I get it. He has been so incredibly gracious and I want to be even an ounce as kind back.
There’s that thing they say about experiences and emotions, how they manifest in our bodies. I think about how every trip to the doctor I’ve been to this month is more than just about a surface physical concern, how it feels like I’m talking about more than just my teeth.
I still cannot bring myself to answer the emails from Spain. As each day passes, my alternate life inches further and further away. I spent the first half of this year preparing for it, anticipating it. The life I was supposed to start in August. I was betting on that life.
There’s a note on my phone that reads, “but even if it’s killing you, the heart would rather attach to something falling apart than risk being completely unanchored!” I can’t remember where it comes from so I don’t know who to attribute it to. In any case, it’s how everything feels, all September and October. Unanchored. Dangerous.
The more time passes, the more murky everything becomes. I am a ghost of myself. At night I lie in bed and feel all my dreams whittling away.
All of October, I think about writing. I sit down to write and nothing comes out. I avoid sitting down to write because I’m afraid that nothing will come out. I sit down to write and so much comes out but none of it is usable. It’s all either too much or not enough. I don’t know what to say because I don’t know what fascinates me anymore, and talking about my inner world week after week just feels disgustingly self-indulgent. I keep thinking that maybe I don’t even have anything to say because all I do with my time is sit around and be sad. I am wrapped up in shame and I sort of know it but I can’t seem to get out of my own way. I have no more interests aside from googling how to not be depressed.
All of October, nothing feels stable. No structure, no constancy, nothing anchoring me home. My mind goes dark places. Or rather, it becomes a dark place in and of itself. I worry that I am trapped beyond hope.
I stop reading. I was starting to see myself in the villains of every story I read.
I feel like a toad in the mire. I have been trying so hard for so long to pick myself back up. I cannot find solid footing. When people ask me how I am doing, I do not know what to tell them. Friends text What’s new with you! and something inside me freezes. They ask me how my week’s going, what I had done the day before, and I struggle to find my answers. Nothing exciting happens, and I am constantly in a state of low-buzzing emotional distress. Being isolated for so long has left me feeling disconnected from the world. I feel like I am drifting. Drifting and stuck, suspended in air. I feel like a ghost in my own life.
All of October, I think about that scene in Frances Ha. They’re about to pay and she’s out of cash and her card gets declined and she goes, “Oh, I’m so embarrassed, I feel like I’m not a person yet.” I spend all of October thinking about how long it’s been since I’ve felt like a person. Nearly two years of strict quarantine life, living like I’m in lockdown even as the world opens up and starts to forget. It eats away at everything.
All of October, I have doctors tell me that nothing is wrong with me. I go to five different doctors for four different things and all of them say, with their varying diagnoses, that nothing is quite as bad as I think. I am relieved, if a little suspicious. There’s one issue that I was definitely right about, but apparently it’s common and fairly manageable even though it will probably never go away. These are all small concerns, routine checkups really, tiny issues that shouldn’t even be a big deal objectively but have been plaguing me for years nonetheless. I joke with my friends about being a hypochondriac then spend hours reading webpages that make me so panicked I can’t sleep.
My last doctor turns out to be the mom of a girl my sister once went to school with. The morning of our appointment, I sit next to my mom and cry in silence. I am scared of what this doctor might tell me.
The checkup is quick and surprisingly easy. I ask her so many questions and to almost all of them she says, It’s fine, yes that’s totally normal, no that’s not out of the ordinary. Her glibness is a consolation. We establish that I’m sort of too anxious about everything, but she is very soothing about it. She makes the anxiety small, like a bug in a glass of water, like something we can joke about. When I tell her about an issue that’s been causing me distress, she assuages my concerns with stories about her other patients. She is generous to me in this way. When she dismisses me from her office, she waves a hand and tells me, as her only prescription, to Stop worrying so much! She laughs and I laugh and I walk home so relieved I want to cry.
The same thing happens on my IELTS exam. I book the test just a few days in advance, thinking it’ll be a breeze, but something in the back of my jittery mind starts to niggle at me. I google the test. Apparently it’s hard. You do need to study. You have to familiarize yourself with the format. Each section can only be done in a certain amount of time. There are specific skills you must remember to utilize. Before the test I spend an hour sitting in my car, bingeing Youtube videos on my phone about the grading criteria, and how you can be a native English speaker but still fail if you don’t say things like “whereas” and “although.” Or something like that.
Anyway I go take the test and it’s so cold my nose starts to drip under my mask. The air conditioner must be cranked up to the max because my fingers have frozen over. I can hardly type. The slowed typing makes my thoughts drag so the words aren’t coming, and I end up not finishing the test’s biggest section, the one that holds the most points. I drive home with a pit in my stomach. I am frustrated at myself for not having studied earlier, for taking so damn long to type, for getting everything wrong all the time these days. Clearly everything is my fault. When I crawl into bed that night, it’s with a certainty that I’ve failed.
A week later, my results come in. I feel nauseous as I open my email, but after an entire week of agonizing I’m used to the anxiety. I take a deep breath and click on the link and close my eyes and when I open them again it says I got an 8.5 out of 9.
One weekday afternoon instead of working on applications I sit by the window and read Writers and Lovers. Marla recommended it to me a year and a half ago, and it feels like divine timing, sort of, to be getting to it now. I can see myself in the hero, who isn’t a hero at all. Just an incredibly flawed person going through the motions. In the opening chapter she says, “I don’t write because I think I have something to say. I write because if I don’t, everything feels even worse.” The book is about pushing through when you think you have nothing. It’s about being an artist in the world, a real artist, a regular person who needs a job to survive and a creative practice to live. It’s about being anxious and depressed and holding tightly to that nugget of gold in your heart that insists on existing anyway.
For two months I read nothing but self-help articles and advice columns and came out of it sounding like a bumper-sticker platitude. But maybe I needed to, at the time.
Heather Havrilesky’s Ask Polly articles feel like a lifeline. In one called “How do I start believing in my own worth?” Havrilesky writes, “The hardest thing about being 25 is that every bad moment feels like a verdict on who you are, on what your life will and won’t be.” All of October brings empirical evidence that I worry more than I should, that I blame myself a lot. I am swamped with so much guilt and shame and self-recrimination. That’s why I can’t see straight.
There’s another one I keep returning to that talks about happiness, and every day I feel like it’s saving my life.
“You’re treating love and success as external rewards that BRING happiness, when in fact love and success are SIDE EFFECTS of happiness. And happiness is all about loving the feeling of working hard. Happiness is all about loving whatever you have, wherever you are, even when you fall on your face, even when you have nothing, even when your muscles are aching and you feel caved in and sad.
You are not lost, she says, you are here. Be here. “Not focused on some moment in the future when everything turns to gold or turns to dust. I want you to look around you as you work, and see that it is brilliant and glistening and you are at the center of everything right here, right now, all alone.”
So I do it. I follow orders. I pay close attention.
When my sister picks up a distress call at 6am her time in New York.
When I write one good verse for a song I’ve been working on.
When my cousin sends me a funny text about some good news that makes us laugh.
When I watch cheesy Netflix Christmas movies with my parents after dinner.
When an old security guard I see every morning smiles beneath his mask and asks for my name.
When I finish three papers for a school application. The immense satisfaction of clicking send.
When I have my first slice of cheesecake in three years. (It is magnificent. Afterwards, my throat itches.)
Sometimes feeling like a ghost brings everything else into sharper focus. One blue night, I’m walking back home and there’s a cat sitting on the sidewalk, its tail flat on the ground, stretched out to its full length. I think about the cat trusting people not to step on it.
The world is bringing many gifts, or maybe I’m just starting to see them more clearly. Just being here and soaking in whatever comes today, it’s enough.
I cross the park one lonely evening feeling hungry and claustrophobic. A rash from the heat and my own sweat crawls up my neck like ivy on a trellis. Joggers huff past me, children clatter by on scooters, friends perch their phones on benches and do dances for TikTok. I don’t know a single one of these strangers but it feels good to be surrounded by all this life.
November comes in like a Hail Mary pass, like a last-minute touchdown, a deus ex machina blockbuster scene.
I don’t know when things changed. All I know is that I was tired, but I had to keep going. I refused to let this be all there was. Every day was slicked in a thin veil of cloudy grime that kept accumulating until I could no longer bear it. There was only one way I’d get to see the light at the end of the tunnel. A slow trudge forward. One foot in front of the other. I woke up and said, I want to live. I realized it was what I had been saying to myself, all along. So I kept saying it, every single day, fighting for my life. I want to live. It no longer mattered who heard it. It no longer mattered that there was no one for miles, in the mud-slicked mire, in the liquid dark.
The universe sent a lot of things my way, exactly when I needed them. I was terrified. I said yes.
I realize how long I’ve been holding my breath. I realize that all this time I’ve been waiting for someone to take a chance on me. I think maybe I just needed to take a chance on myself.
November brings a new job, new people, new creative opportunities. I get to spend time with people for the first time since last year. There’s the fever dream of a week I work on three different video productions with people I look up to and send out an application and sign papers for things to come. I think about the end of Writers and Lovers, the part where Casey cries tears of joy in the parking lot and says we crossed the line.
I could tell you about the friendships I am working to restore, the forgiveness I’ve received. I could tell you about the phone calls and the early mornings and the bathroom tears. I could tell you about all the things that helped — cheesy movies and Ask Pollys and Youtube workouts. People I love, who reminded me they were still there even when I was burnt at both ends. I could tell you about all of it, but I don’t think I can yet, and maybe I won’t be able to for a long time. The fog has just started to clear. I’m still here, crawling through the mire. I am learning how to fall in love with where I am and what I have. I am learning how to savor it now.
November is a run through the airport. It’s the end credits. It’s the opening scene.
When my alarm rings at 5am, my first thought is “I don’t want to wake up” and then I open my eyes to the most glorious sight I’ve seen all week: a glass building outside my window glowing a dusty pink, like a rose quartz in water. My second thought is “I’m going to wake up just for this view alone, every single day.” I realize there are a lot of things to wake up for. Yet again the world brings its gifts. Regardless of how low and helpless and out of reach I might feel, the world will keep bringing its gifts if I can open my eyes for long enough to find them, and I am very very lucky to be here.
Exactly a year and two weeks ago, I sent out this newsletter for the first time. I didn’t know what to say, or if I had anything to say at all. I had nothing but some vague ideas and an intense desire to get going. I remember being up late that night, feeling exhausted deep in my bones and so alive. I was starting something new. It had been a difficult year. I was coming back to myself and I could feel it.
It’s a relief to look back and see how far things have come. Back then, it was endless, pitch-black, zero gravity. Everything was painful and raw to the touch. All I could think about was my sadness. Somewhere in there I began to excavate magic.
I still see myself in the villains of the stories I read. But I am trying to be a little kinder to them now. Maybe not everything about them is ugly. I remind myself there’s something worth fighting for in all of us.
The irony of all of this isn’t lost on me. Sometimes you do need the dark to see the light more clearly. Call it a cliche platitude, but you know it’s true. When everything is bright, nothing blazes. I’ve been holding gratitude extra, extra delicately, like a precious gem. Holding gratitude and looking around and trying, when I can, to take stock. The world brings many gifts. I don’t know what will come up but I trust in that.
I am growing accustomed to waking in the dark. I am very afraid and I don’t feel sure of anything and my heart is open to all the surprises.