the body & the score

I started having jaw problems when I was in high school. I assume from relentless years of clenching. Gradually, at some point, I realized it was clicking every time I opened it. My parents took me to see a dentist who told me not to chew gum and to (essentially) chill out.

Ostensibly, I was suffering from anxiety and so I did not chill out and my symptoms got weirder. One morning I woke up to find that my neck had seized up in my sleep and I couldn’t move. When I managed to crawl stiffly out of bed, I immediately fainted. Around the same time, I started breathing irregularly. It felt like I couldn’t take a deep breath, and I sometimes gasped for air. This is also a classic symptom of anxiety, but the doctor I saw found my blood oxygen saturation alarmingly low and improbably diagnosed me with COPD - a condition that is incredibly rare among young people and that I’m pretty sure I didn’t have. She put me on steroids and painkillers, and finally I blissed out because of the medication. I remember lying on the grass looking up at the sky and thinking I was probably going to die soon.

The breathing got better and then worse. In college, they diagnosed me with asthma and gave me an inhaler. I used it for a while and then I started smoking cigarettes because I wanted to hang out with the smokers and the asthma went away. My jaw got stickier in the cold damp British winters than it had been in California. Something else started happening, which was that when I would stand up I would get a head rush and everything would dissolve into tiny dark pinpoints in front of my eyes. Sometimes I would faint. My doctor chalked that up to low blood pressure which I inherited from my mother. Like me, she’s always freezing, often dizzy, inexplicably sensitive for someone who never gets sick and has never had any major health problems.

All of my issues seemed embarrassing to me. It’s embarrassing for obvious reasons to say that you can’t open your mouth very well. The rest of it felt distinctly Victorian, delicate women with mysterious problems no one can understand. Over the years, I read a lot of personal essays by people, mostly women, who had real inexplicable undiagnosed chronic illness. But my problems all just seemed like endless manifestations of anxiety, some kind of overwrought hysteria, my body keeping the score or whatever. Last year, I was referred to a maxillofacial specialist on Madison Avenue with an eye-watering list of degrees and accomplishments and a really bad attitude. He told me my smile was perfect, explained an evo psych type theory about how people trust you more when your canines are positioned right, and then told me to try to chill out. Find a way to let loose, he said, that’s not, you know, partying. Maybe meditate.

The temporomandibular joints connect your jaw to your skull. They’re basically hinges that slide back and forth, allowing you to open and close your jaw. They are apparently among the most complex joints in the body. Because they are connected to both the lower jaw and the base of the skull, they also have an intricate relationship with your facial muscles, ears, neck, and spine. A lot of people develop temporomandibular joint disorders from holding their necks forward the way you might look down at your phone or your laptop or at a book. A physical therapist I saw prescribed myofascial release exercises and sitting ergonomically and breathing deeply to release tension. I do not sit ergonomically and I do not meditate. I mostly sit with my body all twisted up, my legs tucked under, squinting at my screen. To let loose, I do, at times, party.

When I was growing up, my family always had really bad health insurance and we didn’t go to the doctor very much. Instead we took garlic and echinacea as a cure-all for everything. I still hate going to the doctor so I basically only go to urgent care, which is more expensive and less functional, but where they’re always really nice to me. It’s less that I don’t trust doctors, although sometimes I don’t, and more that I don’t feel like a competent patient - one who is able to make their needs known and to respond clearly and decisively to questions asked. My body often feels opaque to me and its sensations detached from my general experience of time. I imagine everything inside of me like mold which only becomes visible when it germinates large enough colonies, an impossibly intricate network of delicate, branching filaments. Whenever I am able to coherently describe what I am experiencing, it seems to be at odds with whatever the doctors think.

The first year I lived in New York, I started having constant headaches. I had moved to the city for a graduate program that I immediately hated and had experienced two recent deaths. The apartment I lived in turned out to be infested with mice but my roommates, a vegan and a hippie, didn’t want to kill them so instead we got humane traps. I read online that mice could die from anxiety if they were trapped for too long which seemed worse to me than dying in a steel trap. I couldn’t sleep because I was worrying too much about that. I would get up every few hours and go look to see if we had caught any mice and if they were having panic attacks. Predictably, we never caught anything.

I went to see a doctor about the headaches and she offered me a Xanax prescription and told me to relax. I went to see a really weird therapist because she took my insurance and she told me a friend of hers had experienced constant headaches and then had dropped dead from an aneurysm. You should get that checked out, she said.

In all likelihood, the headaches were related to my jaw problems because headaches are a common side effect of the disorder. It’s surprising to me that no one suggested that but I probably never brought it up as a possibility. I didn’t go back to the doctor or to the therapist and instead self-diagnosed it as a side effect of smoking cigarettes. I moved out of the mouse infested apartment and got really into barre, which did actually help my posture. The headaches decreased in frequency and severity and eventually faded.

Like most things, the outcome felt nebulous to me. Maybe it really was anxiety that I had successfully self-managed. Or maybe it was the complex misalignment of my head and neck that I had soothed. Sometimes I thought I had had an aneurysm but I had unconsciously diffused it, like a tiny bomb inside of my head, through the power of manifestation. (In my imagination, this is a mashup of the Grey’s Anatomy episode where Meredith has to help diffuse a bomb and the episode where she nearly drowns and has an out of body experience in a hospital corridor that is halfway to the afterlife.)

It’s hard to talk about your body without metaphors and easy to slip into narrativizing. When I got an IUD on a Friday, I went out that night, and months later, when I developed severe side effects, it felt like my punishment for not staying at home and convalescing, a kind of biblical curse for being a bad woman. But in real life, most things that happen to you don’t really have a lesson. It’s all pretty random. I try to resist inventing coherent narratives about my body because so many of them feel alien and external to me, heavily weighted with social currency. Instead it sort of feels like I’m moving blindly in the dark, trying to make sense of a thing that is mine but also not mine.

I googled “famous people with jaw problems” to try to make this more interesting but nothing really came up. I did find an orthodontic ad listing four celebrities who confirmed suffer from TMJ, including Iggy Azalea who, “luckily for her and her fans sought treatment right away.” Lucky for her fans! There are many more celebrities who confirmed suffer from anxiety including personal essayist of the moment, Prince Harry. I hope they’re all well.