I sat propped up in bed late on a Thursday morning, my heart racing as I stared down at the dentist’s contact card on my phone screen. Deep within my throbbing head, my foggy brain struggled to sort through a swirl of thoughts — or, more like page through a catalog of excuses. Was there some way, any way, out of making this call?
Alas, I was desperate. The pain radiating from the back of my mouth had leveled me in a way I hadn’t felt since…well, since the last time I put off addressing a cracked tooth because it “wasn’t that bad,” only to have it completely blow up my life within a few months. I’d eaten two tubes of Anbesol and drank a bottle of Orajel wash and sat in the shower crying and clawing at my face like a possessed maniac, and now, I was about to ring up my neighborhood dental office and beg a stranger to give me drugs. As if that wasn’t agonizing enough, I’d had to text a slew of therapy clients earlier that morning to late-cancel their sessions, which cost me two days’ pay and forced me to confront my own hypocrisy.
Don’t I preach to them that short-term avoidance always comes back to bite you, big-time, down the road? That it’s actually easier to do the hard thing than it is to run away and hide?
Nearly 7 years sober from alcohol and I’m still guilty of pulling from the old drunk’s playbook when faced with inconvenience and discomfort. I can be in a state of physical agony and still default to the path of least psychological resistance, needing to be trapped in a “trial by combat” and maced to a bloody pulp before I awaken to reality.
Continue reading “Avoidance”
Jen Wielgus Journalism 