I had to go to the orthodontist for the first time in my life this past Monday, and I found myself in a blindingly bright room with a young doctor and his even younger assistant, staring at giant close-ups of my mouth and face on a public flatscreen monitor.
I hadn’t come there feeling any type of way about being 48 and getting braces — if anything, maybe a little excited about finally being able to smile like a normal person? — but then, they had me stand up against the wall to “cheese” for a camera at various angles, and my brain was struggling to process the finished product: Craggy skin crinkling around the narrow slits of my eyes. Shocks of gray-white hair popping out from both temples. A motley crew of crooked, chipped. coffee-stained teeth, which gravity was pulling and tilting into the empty gaps where their poor load-bearing compatriots had been clenched, cracked, and lost forever.
This old lady is me. This is how I look now. Yikes.
I felt the sudden urge to apologize for the grotesque spectacle laid before us. “Well, happy Halloween, I guess? Heh heh! I mean, hello, Crypt Keeper! … Maybe I should just get dentures and call it a day?”
It really is true that “hell is other people,” because when I’m on my own, day to day, I don’t really give a shit about aging or my various, plentiful physical flaws. I’m a low-maintenance, minimal-makeup kind of gal, and the rare times I do post selfies on social media, usually to show off one of my 10,000 sporty hats, they are unfiltered and never, ever, EVER enhanced by AI.
Yes, I am self-conscious about my chompers (see closed-mouth smiles depicted below), but it wasn’t vanity leading me to the ortho’s office. My dentist bullied me down the path of midlife metal mouth, to the tune of $6,000, because my jacked-up teeth are apparently a health hazard. Otherwise, I would’ve been fine riding the wave of aging to wherever it washed me up, because what’s the alternative? Spend the rest of my years getting shot up with Botox, fretting over buccal fat or whether I need an upper bleph? (Damn, all these plastic procedures even sound ugly!) …Uh, no.
Still, I’m human, and I do have some aversion to, you know, looking hideous. Being so utterly exposed at my ortho appointment made me confront the incongruence between what I might be showing on the outside versus what’s been going on inside for the past 7+ years. “Evil sea hag” is not the reality I perceive in my bathroom mirror or Zoom square or those occasional selfies, and it’s definitely not how I feel inside my body.
With 88 months of continuous sobriety under my belt, I’m the realest version of me that I’ve ever been, and there are moments when I feel absolutely beautiful in the body I have and the life I’ve built.
Recovery from addiction forced me to acknowledge, then slowly start to accept and even embrace what’s real and true, about me and for me. As psychology icon Carl Rogers famously wrote, “The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change.” Of course, when it comes to what’s real and true around me, reckoning with that has never been more challenging.
Side note: I controlled what I could last week by hoofing over to the courthouse in Doylestown between sessions with clients and voting straight blue on an on-demand midterm ballot. I convinced my husband to do the same at nearby Bucks County Community College over the weekend. Honestly, Tuesday is gonna be one of those “picked a bad decade to stop swilling booze” moments, there’s no way around it…😬😬😬😬
The trajectory of human society over the past 10 years here in the US has driven me even more passionately toward the non-human world as a source of sanity and groundedness. That’s why every post I write lately ends up being a love letter to nature.
Nature expands my perspective, broadens my view of what’s truly valuable and worth worrying about. I’ve found that perspective, and openness. make self-acceptance come a lot easier. Like, what’s my real purpose for being here or doing this [whatever the thing is], and will I serve this purpose or get what I seek to get out of this thing if I keep obsessing about granular details, such as a bad photo, my aging appearance, or outside opinions thereof?
Aren’t people all just reacting to the world based on their own backgrounds and issues? And do pictures ever really do justice to the subject being pictured?
I included the above photo, one, because it is the best possible example of realness and what grounds me — a nature walk with my partner of 22 years (19 married), and the rare other person who does not feel like hell — and two, because it helps me finally get to a point and wrap this thing up. 😅
My husband and I haven’t been walking together as much over the past several months; our schedules haven’t matched up, as he’s in the thick of his fall pickleball league, and up until mid-October, I was trekking out to Chester County every weekend to paddleboard at Marsh Creek. But we went out last Sunday, and in the course of our meanderings around Tyler State Park, in between my “look at that!”s every time I spotted an extra-colorful tree, J-P was discussing one of his recent business trips to Nashville.
It hit me as he talked, describing the experience of being in bars with folks who love their booze and getting different reactions to ordering mocktails or Diet Cokes, then waking up in a hotel with meetings or an early flight to get to and wondering how the hell anyone functions in life after getting drunk the night before…that this guy still doesn’t drink, even though he absolutely could. He stopped cold turkey more than 7 years ago just to support me!
It’s an established truth that rarely occurs to me anymore. I guess I’ve taken for granted how much of a difference my knowledge of, and faith in, his sobriety has made in my journey. When I really think about it, it’s been a crucial factor in creating this “life I don’t want to escape from.” It’s given me a safe, peaceful sanctuary at home that helps make outside reality tolerable. It’s laid the foundation for my new career as a therapist, and my newfound freedom as a grownup who’s capable of moderation, balance, and acceptance, at long last!
Maybe I would’ve quit drinking and “found myself” on my own before my wave crashed and time expired. Who knows? The reality is that I didn’t/don’t have to, because J-P just keeps showing up, showing me I’m genuinely loved, even as a tinsel-toothed old sea hag with an addiction to sporty hats.
We had been chuckling as we walked, agreeing that at our advanced age, wanting to hold on to our athleticism and active lifestyle with a death grip as we do, that the mere idea of consuming alcohol anymore seems positively ridiculous. And I suddenly felt tears streaming down my cheeks.
It was a powerful mixture of joy, gratitude, relief, hope, and certainty, the rarest feeling of all, that what I — what we — have right now is real.
