The dental office I went to as a kid had a subscription to Highlights, a children’s magazine full of puzzles, rhymes, empty pages to fill with color. Our bi-annual trip to Bolivar, a twenty-five minute drive from our house, sometimes felt exciting for me because I knew I’d have four-five issues of Highlights to flip through in the waiting room while my brother got his teeth cleaned. Ethan loved the bubblegum flavored fluoride and the giant stuffed panda bear our dentist had sitting within line of vision in his exam room. Dr. S., our dentist, was someone my father knew from high school, an Ohio State dentistry graduate who always made fun of my father for his tobacco dipping and lack of dental hygiene. My teeth, monitored by Dr. S. as they transitioned from baby teeth to adult teeth, stayed small and gappy as I aged. In middle school we put braces on my teeth in the hopes that the metal brackets would reduce the gaps between my teeth, would make the small shapes of my mouth prettier, more normal-looking. As a pre-teen I nodded along with Dr. S. as he convinced my parents to invest in braces; I wanted anything that seemed to promise me beauty, especially as my body changed, as my skin flared red with acne.

Turns out braces didn’t change my teeth. I had them on for a year and a half, all through my seventh grade year, and when they came off, that day sitting across from the stuffed panda, I waited for a beauty that I thought I’d been promised. I’m ashamed of how many times my brain has traveled through this kind of thinking— that if I get X, I will finally have arrived. If I change X about myself, I will finally love myself unconditionally. As a young girl especially it felt like I was being fed aspirations nonstop. Low-rise jeans, flat stomachs, eating disorders to get a flatter stomach, highlights, zig-zag parts, flat irons, Hollister polos, vodka sodas to avoid calories or unnecessary sugar, grapefruit diets. When my braces came off, Dr. S. instantly recommended that we put veneers on my teeth. He wasn’t pretending that the braces did their job. My parents balked at the cost of porcelain veneers, went back and forth with Dr. S. about how many veneers would be necessary. My dad, always looking to save money, vouched for two veneers only, one on each of my top front teeth. Dr. S. explained, though, that six veneers would be best and after some behind-the-scenes haggling and, I’m guessing now, arguing between my parents, Dr. S. put six veneers on my teeth. I was fifteen. I didn’t care about longevity or cost or anything except being beautiful. Or maybe not beautiful but something more serious— noticeable.

The beginning years of high school were about endless pursuit; Etnies sneakers, A&F denim, Victoria’s Secret push-up bras, Curious by Britney Spears perfume, Aeropostale swimsuits. Early aughts screamed capitalistic propaganda from the rooftops of my life, not caring about my parents’ financial limitations. I thrashed so hard against the realities of our finances: while everyone at school lived in the same residential area, we lived elsewhere in a ranch home that was sometimes mistaken for a trailer. Fohl Village, a trailer park, was right down the street'; sometimes in the summer we’d sneak into their community pool. When the school bus took Dueber Avenue to Interstate 77 for class field trips I lied and told my classmates that I lived in the house down the street from where I actually lived. It was a house with brown shutters and one of those pretty koi ponds, a big house wide enough for me to fit everything I expected of myself and my life into. My parents, neither of them college-educated, worked odd hours in relentless places (bakeries, tire factories, shipment fulfillment centers); they managed to put my brother and me on travel sports teams, expensive pursuits requiring infinite dollars of gas and snack money. All this to say that I knew we had less money than others, knew we were on the low end of the middle class bracket; I knew too that my school district was poorer than others in my area, that there were kids in my classes who were unable to buy lunch or socks. I knew this all somewhere intrinsically, but I bucked against it. At the grocery store with my mother I would wander off before the cashier told my mother the total, before my mother gulped and got out her checkbook. Such complicated emotions in that turning away.

So did I think of the financial burden veneers would put on my parents? Sort of. Momentarily. But I wanted the ticket to beauty, to worthiness. So we got the six veneers and for fifteen years they’ve sat shining on top of my real teeth, most people unaware that the smile they’re seeing is made not of bone but of material. Over the years the old porcelain has chipped or cracked, and Dr. S. has fixed them at no cost (a family favor, he winked at my father). But for the past few years Dr. S.’s temporary fixes have proved unsustainable. Two of the six veneers chipped or fell off completely in the past year, letting my real teeth come to the surface of my appearance for the first time in over a decade. When Dr. S. originally put my veneers on, he had to shave down my teeth in order for the veneers to fit. The cracking of the old veneers let me see how small, how weak, how discolored my real teeth were. I started smiling without opening my mouth, started paying more attention to what my top lip was doing when I spoke. Many friends, for the first time, noticed my teeth. When I interviewed for a new job, a significant promotion in title and responsibility, I practiced my angles in the Zoom camera, hoping to limit exposure to my cracked, dirty tooth.

What was I actually scared of? I tell myself now, in retrospective writing, that the professional setting of the interview is what made my anxiety spiral. That it wasn’t about beauty in the same way it was when I was 15; my feelings of fear and shame came not from a shallow desire to be seen as beautiful but out of a need to be seen as assertive, professional, every inch the Assistant Director that I now was. But that isn’t 100% true. What these quests into teeth, one at fifteen and one at twenty-nine, really made me afraid of was that I’d be found out.

Seems a bit paradoxical since earlier I noted that what I wanted above all was to be noticed. But being noticed and being found out are not the same. One is gentle; an onlooker taking note. And one is violent in its didacticism, a researcher holding up a magnifying glass to the truth. I’m afraid someone will hold up a magnifying glass to my life and learn the truths I don’t even know about myself. That I’m a white-trash girl who lived down the road from the trailer park with bad teeth. That the life I’ve built and manifested is only a fraud.

It’s almost funny how ridiculous this line of thinking is. Fraud? I’m drinking coffee on my balcony while sirens blare across La Brea. There’s no glamour there, there’s no faking that. But that’s how anxiety works. When anxiety is the one in the control seat, the fears become the truth, and you begin to operate as if the fears are reality. Not only your reality, but shared reality. Everyone’s reality. Anxiety makes a lot of assumptions, and unless you sit in the anxious feelings you are at risk of acting on anxious reality rather than real reality. I’ve been experiencing a lot of intrusive thoughts the past few months, mostly centered around a beloved friend of mine relocating. The thoughts come quickly, questioning if my relationship with this friend will last the move (it will, of course); if she will see me as worthy of love when we’re not down the road from one another (she will, of course); if I’m so annoying in my need for validation that I will have made these fears into a reality (potentially). It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy in which I dismantle the trust I’ve built in my friendship. Unfair to my friend, unfair to our love. It’s cruel, that my own brain can do this. That it can send me red-hot questions that feel so urgent I can feel my heart beating. Anxiety makes me plan ahead, arrive early, map things out, but it also makes me distrustful, desperate, clingy.

I write often but I’m never sure if my musings on anxiety quite land the way I want them to. Anxiety, in the way I experience it, is incredibly difficult to describe. On paper it seems easy and obvious: just sit tight and let the anxious thoughts wash over you, don’t make any impulsive decisions while anxiety is in the driver’s seat. But the heaviness of the thinking. The manipulative reasoning and endless loops of catastrophizing. The taking of one possible action and thinking through every possible conclusion. It’s a form of torture and sometimes if I try getting in the ring with it I end up more wounded than ever before. It is exhausting to think this quickly, to call forth so many possibilities, all of which hurt. And there’s shame, too, in admitting how untrue, implausible, and sometimes ridiculous the anxious thoughts are. I’m smarter than this, I sometimes whisper to myself. And that’s a good thing, knowing that the thinking you is separate from the anxious you. But there’s an air of disgust in that I’m smarter than this too. That’s the piece of the puzzle I’m committed to working on this year— not only sitting in patience with my anxiety but being kind to the anxiety. Comforting it rather than laughing at it.

Tarot has been a guide for me through my anxiety, especially the last few years. Tarot for The Wild Soul, a podcast I listen to regularly, recently included an episode on the Six of Swords. The episode is titled ‘Letting Ourselves be Witnessed with Six of Swords,’ and the podcast grapples with the card’s reality. I have always viewed this card as a turning away, a necessary and even urgent departure from what is no longer serving us. Lindsay Mack, in her podcast, led me to view the card differently. In her reading, there are three aspects of the self on this boat. There’s an adult figure, their child, and a driver of the boat. These figures represent the triangle nature of the self; the thinking mind, represented by the sitting adult, is lost in planning, staring straight into the darkness and envisioning only catastrophic results. The inner child, tucked tightly to the adult, seeks to be comforted, a comfort the thinking mind cannot give while in such contraction. But also present here is the knowing self, the steerer of the boat, the guide we can always, always call on when we are in contraction. Inner Wise One. Inner Protector. It’s a challenge to access this part of ourselves, especially when it feels inevitable to sit in anxiety. But merely remembering it’s there can be a comfort. We can call on this part of ourselves for medicine. We can wrap the anxious inner child and the thinking, over-extended adult in blankets of trust.

A few nights ago Hans and I got into an argument. The argument was based on something tactical, a necessary discussion that stormed at the edges. With Hans especially I’ve had to call upon the part of my self who drives my ship. My Protector self. I call on my self to comfort me when I’m scared of being abandoned; I wrap myself in the trust that the love I share with Hans has given me. There’s the validation. Not in the new white smile but in the trust. In the bravery it takes to trust.