Pulling Teeth
1.
IPsychosomatic, 1847, “pertaining to the relation between mind and body”. . . . Applied from 1938 to physical disorders with psychological causes. Etymologically it could as easily apply to emotional disorders with physical causes, but it is rarely used as such. — Douglas Harper, Online Etymology Dictionary wanted to rip my face off—the incessant pressure, the fireworks of artificial light. I was a caged wolf scenting the stranger or sniffing the fire, but unable to head for the hills. I prowled the Internet, googling psychotic break. Maybe I was going to do something terrible, maybe I was going to try to hurt myself, maybe I would hurt someone else . . . maybe I needed to quit my job, I needed a few days by myself, maybe I needed a divorce, I needed, I needed.. . fight or flight . . . I needed to get into the car and keep driving. I needed to punch someone. I needed to rip my face off. I spent the evening rocking on the brick of our back stoop. I slept fitfully and woke to find myself clawing at my face. Obviously, this pressure was a metaphor. The holidays approaching. An early midlife crisis. Budget cuts and salary freezes at work. Returning from a vacation abruptly rerouted to Florida because terrorist attacks had rocked Paris, our intended destination. And I was no stranger to this internal jangling, the palpitations and cold sweats. I reminded myself of all the times I couldn’t catch my breath, or feared I would vomit, or felt my throat closing shut, all the times the doctors had observed: Well, aren’t you just a bundle of nerves? Weeks earlier, I had gone to see my dentist over a sore tooth. He chalked up my pain to a misaligned bite and stress-related teeth clenching. And a single sore tooth was such a small thing, especially for me. You would not notice it if we were chatting, but if you saw a panoramic X-ray of my mouth, you would see how my smile has been strung together—the opacity of crowns, the bright pockmarks of amalgam, the glint of titanium screws threading into the bone. I have notoriously bad teeth, genetically thin enamel. I look at a cupcake and get a cavity. So, truly, one sore tooth was such a small thing. Still, the next day I decided