Even my dentist says so
The imagination is a great asset to the writer. It’s also, I think, a detriment to the person insofar as paranoia goes. Like this: a few weeks ago, I had this headache. A Flat on the Couch with a Washcloth Over the Eyes job. Problem is, it stayed. The next day, the next day, the next day, pounding behind my eyes. Not like migraine-intense, more subtle than that. Like when you’ve slept too many hours and you feel prickly the next day. It wasn’t the magnitude of the thing that had me freaked out (and I’ve been very freaked out. Very foolishly so. Read on), it was the continuation of it. “Shouldn’t this be gone by now?” I was asking myself by the sixth day, but no.
(I should note that Christopher and I are hooked on Netflix. Specifically serial television. We’ve watched all of the sopranos, Carnivale, Arrested Development and are now halfway through the second season of Six Feet Under. If you’re not familiar with the show, than A. Oh my god you should be! It’s only the greatest thing I’ve ever seen on TV, and please don’t give me the whole I don’t watch TV, I read books, I’m fundamentally against the cultural changes and corporate manipulation and cancer that comes through television because, seriously, who isn’t? At least insofar as we’re all willing to admit. So rent the damned DVD ‘cause it’s excellent and creepy and honest and devastating and hilarious and B. there’s this character, Nate, who finds out he has a debilitating brain disorder (neurological. Not psychological, but that too) that gives him horrible headaches that lead to horrible seizures and, soon, horrible death)
(You see where this is going, right? I’m getting so transparent!)
So what happened was, I convinced myself that I had a brain disorder. Either that, or (and this is equally if not more fucked up) my teeth were rearranging inside my mouth and I had to get immediate dental surgery of the painful and expensive variety (this being fueled by a recent change in my dental insurance and my thinking I better get everything done ASAP while I still have full coverage). So I go to the dentist. And I have a great dentist. Dr. Gould, if you’re in the market, on Michigan Avenue. He’s very thorough and he takes it in stride when paranoid hypochondriacs make emergency appointments because their teeth were rearranging inside their mouths (I imagined them caving in. Folding over flat on the roof and base of my mouth). He gives me the whole examination —no oral cancer. Gums fine. Etc—and at the end he tells me that I’m clenching my jaw and that’s causing the pain (along with, probably, seasonal allergies and three weeks of one-on-one conferences and all the student work I’ve been reading without my reading glasses). “So what do I DO?” I ask, and you know what he says?
“Relax.”