show me your teeth

and welcome to nervous wreckage

This year I’ve been more aware of my jaw than ever.

I had my first dentist appointment in an embarrassingly long time a few weeks ago. The act of just taking off my mask to have a stranger stick her fingers in my mouth while wearing two masks herself was unsettling in its own right. One look at my mouth and the hygienist asked if I’d been waking up with headaches. “There’s evidence of jaw clenching in your cheeks and your teeth,” she told me.

Despite my mixed feelings about my mouth being described like a crime scene, I had to admit that I have been waking up with headaches radiating from my temples. Since March, it’s been near impossible to fully relax my body despite my relative safety and privilege in this pandemic. The hygienist typed up a new entry in my dental records: “Diagnosis: bruxism.” And thus, my headaches were given a new name.

I’m always interested in the ways anxiety manifests (and doesn’t manifest) in the body. Creepy as it sounds, I love to hear people tell me the particular ways anxiety shows up inside them—stomach cramps or sleepless nights, twitchy eyes or tapping of feet. Even the smallest of symptoms can be frustrating while also enlightening. The sensation of anxiety, when put into a clear, physical symptom or pain, is a reminder that it is real. I didn’t make up this worry. A subtle reminder the body always betrays our worries, no matter how hard we try.

I’m not alone in this. Tammy Chen D.D.S. recently reported for the The New York Times on a growing epidemic of teeth cracking due to the stress of life during COVID-19.

But the toll of anxiety doesn’t just stop at our mouths.

It is worth putting our minor ailments stemming from anxiety into perspective. And what about anxiety and emotional trauma? How does fear and trauma change the way anxiety is manifesting, especially during a pandemic? Writer and editor Jess Zimmerman’s essay up at Catapult, “It Doesn’t Hurt, It Hurts All the Time,” weaves personal experience and etymology to map the emotional pain that often informs chronic pain.

Cracked teeth and jaw clenching are very small and very common problems. And certainly nothing compared to news headlines like the ones out of Georgia, where a whistleblower has revealed the horrifically high rate of hysterectomies performed on ICE detainees against their will.

But tallying where anxiety manifests in our bodies, no matter how small or slight (or how large and major) is only going to become more important. Sheltering in place here in New York won’t be lifted anytime soon (definitely not with COVID-19 numbers on the rise right now). The fact of the matter is, evidence of the anxiety we feel during the pandemic IS physically mounting in our bodies whether we want it to or not.

We already know that traumatic adverse childhood experiences can create health problems in adulthood, but we also know that trauma can echo through generations. Sadness, fear, and survival instincts aren’t linear experiences. Grace Chiang’s op-ed in the New York Times does a beautiful job exploring how healing her anxiety and depression meant addressing the trauma that not only she faced, but her parents faced as well.

My small pains pale in comparison to the stress and anxiety children and teens today are facing in the midst of this pandemic. In what might be one of the most heart-wrenching longreads I’ve encountered this year, entitled “Children in the Shadows,” reporter Samantha M. Shapiro follows families who must navigate deeply complicated and inadequate homeless shelter systems in New York City. While not explicitly about anxiety, distress underlies every line of Shapiro’s reporting.

When we’re stuck at home, what choice do we have but to observe our bodies in minute detail? There’s no distractions from the bumps on my arms or my weight on the scale or the pressure building at the junction of my temple, ear, and jawline.

I take a small sliver of comfort in knowing that I’m not alone. This week, during the chaotic verbal trash fire of a 2020 presidential debate, I took comfort in knowing I wasn’t the only one trying to relax their jaw while watching.

And the morning after it aired, Twitter was full of people tweeting about their headaches and jaw aches from a night of anxious sleep. I scrolled and I massaged my jaw and I liked the tweets, over and over and over again.