Feelings Are Facts

23 months.

Almost 2 years.

The ortho put on an even tighter wire last week (what is this the fourth in 5 months?) and everything has felt off kilter since. I wake up with the right side of my jaw hurting, teeth not lining up in a way that I can comfortably chew, and feeling like I've been hurtled back in time a year when it felt exactly the same way. I convinced myself that I could pay two years of penance and then this would all be over, but now my timeline has been extended by six months, and possibly more. We're optimistically looking at December.

I signed a contract, both literally and emotionally, to go through this process for two years, but now that the terms of that contract have not been upheld, I am in a word, angry. If I don't have to keep to the rules of this contract anymore, then the renegade revolutionary is coming out. Guns blazing.

My boss said to me today, "Feelings are facts" which I thought was so wise. The reality of any situation doesn't matter, it's the perception of it, the feeling of it that rules one's existence. ("Nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so" said our fair Hamlet, and his perceptions were not always correct.) I've had my own misperceptions about what I look like, how I feel, even how I'm supposed to react. My friend Mick had a come-to-Jesus moment with me the other night when he emphatically told me that these braces do not make me any less in any way. Mick has this great voice and earnestness that makes it easy to believe him. With this broken two year contract, I'm now angry enough to believe him.

I've reset the clock on he right hand side of the page. We're back into the 100s when we really should have been in the low single digits. Nothing left to do, but in the words of Usher: push it to the limit give it more. Thanks to my niece, this is my new theme song.