In the first week of April, I spent four days in Chicago. I was met by a drizzle and a dash of snow which continued until my last day. Among the highlights were the Metra, Cloud Gate (The Bean), which was under construction, visiting an old friend I met in My Travels in Southeast Asia and meeting a new one who ran a modest, family-owned jewelry shop, and the Starbucks Reserve Roastery, the first of which I went to in Seattle. Best of all, quality time with some of my favorite people: my wife, her sister, and her sister’s husband.
Offsetting this, I faced a pain in my left jaw and teeth, coming and going like a weary traveler playing some terrible music, crescendoing to a cacophony that calmed under the cool swish of water, subsiding long enough to enjoy my time in The Windy City, before the traveling musician returned to deliver his unwelcome refrain.
When I returned, the dentist diagnosed me not with an infection as I thought, but with the same old Bruxism I’ve had for years, “a condition where a person grinds, clenches, or gnashes his or her teeth.”
I clench. A mouthguard protects me nightly, but I’d taken a brief hiatus due to some previous jaw pain, thinking the mouthguard’s absence would benefit me. It didn’t. Why I experienced bruxism in the first place, I will uncover shortly.
I’ve experienced teeth sensitivity before, but never like I did in Chicago. Eating caused a flare up. Hot foods were ruthless. Sugar was savage. My cheek was chewed up, my gums were sore, my jaw ached. It went beyond the discomfort I experienced in the past. I’d put the pain at 4/10. Maybe a 5. I could still move about, but it was bad enough to drive me to stillness, for fear of making it worse.
This issue began almost three years ago. I had finished my MFA at ODU, where I had written the first draft of The Return of the Flame. In Summer 2021, my wife accepted her first travel nursing contract in Columbia, South Carolina. By October, we arrived. I continued revising the novel. As Hemingway said, “There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.” Time and passion drove me.
I learned a few key parts of myself during that time. First, I can stick to a schedule. I thrive on routine. Second, I didn’t love being by myself as much as I was. Third, I can get fixated on perfection. With the novel, of course, but also with my schedule. Because no one was holding me accountable except for myself, I became progressively harder on myself to abide by the structure I had created.
This affected my sleep, how I approached preparing for bed. Everything had to be perfect, namely the minimum number of hours I slept. I must get at least 8 hours, which meant I must get to sleep at the right time every night—or earlier. Even if I wasn’t tired or was having a hard time sleeping, even if it was too early, I was in bed because that was my routine.
This hyper-fixated and stressed mentality surrounding a sleep that should be peaceful was a major contributor to teeth clenching. Because my wife worked four 12-hour nights and slept during the day, I was also alone often. It was fine when I was working, four or five hours every weekday morning. In the afternoons, I would read, but by the downward slope of the day, I was feeling myself slide meaninglessly into night, when I would spend a brief time with my wife before she was off again.
My biggest issue was that I didn’t know how to handle free time. I still struggle with this, which is why I now believe being busy is far more ideal than having nothing to do. Well, a writer should always have something to do because there are always more stories to write and more books to read. Yet what does one do if he has virtually all the time he wants to write and read? How does he sustain it? Greater men than I may be able to find solace only in the company of words, but my ideal island is not so shut off from real people.
I turned to alcohol. Only on weekends. An arguably fair indulgence, though drinking alone and watching a movie didn’t feel like the best use of time. My belief was that it would help me relax. It did. And it occupied some of that free time in which I couldn’t bring myself to write or read any longer.
All of this surrounded the emergence of my condition. I attribute my bruxism to an existential tension I locked in during that time and carried with me to the present.
The clenching happens when I’m asleep, so in many ways, I’m powerless to correct it; however, I’m making peace with the past pain, finding a hope in a return to teaching and a better balance with people (and alcohol), and a knowledge that I have power to correct myself while I’m awake to affect how I behave when I’m asleep.
The cure to existential tension is relaxing into existence.
Onward and upward,
Lee
