Teeth

Teeth.

We use them to bite, eat, pronounce words, smile. I became hyper-aware of mine in class six after a classmate giggled and asked me why mine look like that. Since then, I have always had a strange relationship with them.

Growing up, we had a shop attached to our house in Donholm, east of Nairobi, where I was born and raised, you know those neighbourhood kiosks that have shopkeepers who see you at your worst? Yes, one of those. The shop had a metal counter built into the front wall adjacent to our main gate where customers stood to make and receive their purchases. In the evening, it would be pulled up and turned into a metal window that would metamorphosize again into the counter the next morning. I have vague memories of the shop with its dishwater grey wall advertising Tuzo milk. We always used KCC or Brookside at home, barely ever Tuzo. This would make me wonder why we had it painted at the front. It made no sense to me. Of course, this was before I grasped the intricacies of advertising.

Like every estate kiosk, we also sold the other usual groceries: bread, soap, stationery, soda, candy, among others. Candy. I loved candy. I’m not a. fan of sugary treats these days, but in my formative years, I had a sweet tooth. I’d devour cake, juice, ice cream, chocolate, you name it. Whenever left unsupervised, I would climb up the kitchen counter armed with a teaspoon to steal some sugar or Milo. I suspected the “Johnny Johnny, yes Papa” nursery rhyme was created just to torment me with guilt.

We sold a wide variety of candy at the shop, but the ones I distinctly remember are patco, koo, and my favourite chewing gum to overindulge in, Mr. Berry. Unfortunately, my oral hygiene routine couldn’t keep up with my habits, so after a while, I developed a cavity on my right canine. The cavity ate away at my tooth until only a half tooth was left close to my gum. By then, I was already old enough to understand that I’d soon grow another set of teeth, so this was the least of my concerns.

I don’t remember when or why, but we eventually closed down the shop. As I grew older, my milk teeth began to shake. It was my dad’s duty to pull them out, including the rotten ones. He’d done this for my sister before me — the task was so easy there was no need to spend money on a dentist. When it was time to do it, I would cry and hide from him, informed by the trauma that had been previously inflicted by the process. The shock from suddenly getting a tooth pulled out had stayed with me, so I would go to any lengths to avoid experiencing it again. But, as he was the adult and I was the child, he would always find me and I would always go through the excruciating experience again. Afterwards, I would be instructed to avoid licking the empty sockets. But it was my mouth, and I found the feeling and metallic taste of the bruised flesh so strange and intriguing, and besides, who would know if I did?

Besides the canine with a cavity, I don’t remember my milk teeth. I don’t remember what they looked like and barely any old pictures of me with a wide smile exist. I also don’t know when the rest of them were removed. What I do remember is throwing them up the roof of our employee’s living space because we didn’t practise the tooth fairy tradition in our home. Besides, My parents told me that was what they used to do as kids, and I wanted to be like them.

There’s a primary school in the estate I grew up in. It has a playground that my friends and I would sneak into during the weekends or when it was closed for the holidays. I recall jumping the black gate made of tall metal rails well up to the age of twelve. The playground had slides, car tyres, a seesaw, and a swing set to play with on the gravel ground. There was also a huge bee hive near one of the buildings that we would avoid getting too close to. I have memories of sneaking into the playground on hot afternoons, wary of the estate’s security guards, and playing silently until we were either exhausted or caught and had to escape.

Digging up memories and looking back at them fondly is something I’ve always enjoyed. The nostalgia always comes with a sense of mystery because I recognize that most of the details of my memories are forever lost to time. One can never truly remember everything unless it was recorded exactly as it was, and this makes me feel awe and slight sadness at all of the things we lose to time. I have a memory of when I nearly broke two of my front teeth during one of these excursions, and like most memories I have of those days, this one is hazy.

I don’t remember what I wore that day, what I’d had for breakfast, or what my hair looked like, but I do remember how hot it was — the mid-morning sun beating down on us and heating up the gravel on the playground till my bare feet hurt from stepping on it on my way to the slides as I liked to play barefoot. My friends and I were enjoying our playtime when one of us thought they heard the security guard coming. Startled, we scrambled to flee the scene, only to realise that it was a false alarm, so we rushed back to play. Amidst this chaos, I tripped and fell face-first on the lower part of the slide. My mouth bled so much from the impact that I was certain I’d lost my two front incisors. On the verge of tears, I remembered my science lessons about teeth and how once one grew their permanent set, they’d never grow another. I didn’t want to lose my final set. They shook as I made my way back home but stopped later on. I never told my parents about the incident.

Before my classmate asked me why my teeth look like that, I hadn’t paid much attention to them besides the previously rotten canine. I’d been too preoccupied with Encarta, GTA San Andreas, and my crushes; too focused on writing down any GTA cheat codes I could use to hack my way into the next town and take women on dates (I don’t think I ever completed the game, the easter eggs were much more exciting for me) to think about things like teeth. But now I’d suddenly been made aware that my teeth looked like that. By this time, I had reduced my sugar obsession and so my teeth were perfectly healthy with no cavities in sight, but I was now painfully aware of how misaligned they were and how odd this was.

The ridicule coupled with the realisation that I couldn’t just immediately change this unpleasant thing about myself made me spiral. A disconcerting seed had been planted in my imaginative mind, and my eleven-year-old self battled with it. So I immediately started looking for solutions and found that the easiest one would be for me to keep my mouth shut. Does something really exist if it cannot be seen? I’ve seen photos of myself at age ten, smiling widely by the beach with my parents. When they were taken, I didn’t have any thoughts about beauty. I was simply having a great time at the beach. I’d look at those pictures a few years after, harshly judging my smile, thinking of what beauty was and how far off I was from it. At that point, the beauty standards were heavily dictated by the media. Afternoons on Trace Urban were spent wishing I’d look like the women in the music videos. Actors were the paragon of beauty to me, and I started noticing how the majority of them had perfect straight teeth, and it slowly dawned on me that this was a key feature required to meet the standard.

Why do your teeth look like that?

After its inception, after the giggle and comment that sparked it, my obsession with teeth lasted about five to seven years. My sudden awareness of the deep overbite I had coloured my days as I tried to understand why and when it had happened. Before the comment, I never consciously thought about, or hesitated before, smiling or laughing. These gestures would simply be coerced from me by the joy that brought them forth. Up until then, I had never thought about the movement of my mouth or the state of my teeth while expressing myself. Suddenly, I forgot how to convey joy without fussing over them. I started laughing like my mouth was a secret, using my hand to cover it and adopted my now usual close-lipped smile. I started looking at people’s teeth and wondering why mine couldn’t just grow without any complications. It felt so unfair. Everyone I’d see out and about and in movies and pictures were simply studies of teeth to me. Whenever I’d see others with snaggle teeth smile without any inhibitions I would feel jealous, envious of their ability to live freely and therefore, to me, without insecurities.

I was never one to speak about my insecurities as I believed that they were mine to deal with, work through, and overcome all by myself. As a result of this, I never shared this with anyone and was afraid of having this insecurity used against me. I was so mean to myself back then, conjuring scenes in my head where my crushes would reject me and call me ugly because of my teeth. I wasn’t sure how I would react if anyone ever decided to be vile and point out something that was not easily alterable. Growing up, conflict was a very uncomfortable experience for me so I did anything I could to avoid getting caught up in a confrontation due to this. I’d be terrified of the way my heart might race if someone more outspoken than me confronted me. I was not very outspoken, knowing I’d possibly cry and that would be embarrassing so I avoided anything that would lead to that.

My obsession with teeth and awareness that mine looked like that heightened when I discovered social media. We’d recently gotten WiFi, and while obsessively reading Wattpad stories, I discovered social networking apps with Youtube being the first one. I heard Laura, my older sister, and her friends always talking about Facebook and my parents talked about it too. The grown-ups were talking about it and so by that, I was interested in it. One of the evenings, I sat on the couch next to the living room sink with my mum’s laptop and googled the website. Its blue and white logo was familiar seeing I’d seen my sister scroll on it before and so I typed my email address, feeling as if I was at the precipice of something grand. The account needed a profile picture and at first, I wanted to upload one of a fictional character but I thought against it and decided to take one. Slightly anxious, I gave my best close-lipped smile, taking my first profile picture using the webcam and so I joined Facebook in January 2015.

I soon discovered that a few of my classmates were on the app too, one of them later mentioning that they saw my profile and thought that my profile picture was beautiful. Even though it was a compliment, this comment, just like the one that had led to my insecurity, struck me strangely. This one though, made me want to post more photos online, replicating the same pose I was in. Dopamine perhaps?

That same year, around March, I joined Instagram. Just like on Facebook, I started posting pictures of myself. The attention I was getting was interesting but warped to me considering I subconsciously knew it was a performance. I would post a photo and the reactions to it would demand an encore so I would post another one soon enough. It was all a fun little game for me considering I did not consider myself beautiful at all, owing to the state of my teeth and other insecurities from a brief bout of bullying in primary school between 2014 and 2015. My close-mouthed smiles were all manufactured as I kept hiding my teeth because they looked like that. It felt like an intricately built lie that I could have fun with considering that the concept of social media was pretty mad to me back then. Interacting with hundreds and even thousands of strangers that I might never run into anywhere or physically interact with?

Soon enough, the lines blurred.

Social media stopped seeming like something entirely distant to me once I started messaging other people and developing relationships with them. The age of Gold Cup, Colour Fest, and the rest of the hangout events hit me hard, and I realised that introversion aside, I felt a slight urge to hang out with my age mates. It was only natural. The urge was there but not stronger than my terror at being ‘discovered’. I suddenly started carrying feelings of fear. Fear that once the people I had developed relationships with through the screen saw me, they would sneer and giggle, saying I looked nothing like my pictures. They would say that I had taken all of my photos with my mouth shut and I had been hiding my horrifying teeth. They would ask me why my teeth looked like that.

These thoughts became the focus of my teenage years, always hiding my smile, avoiding relationships that would translate offline, avoiding dates, and being deathly startled when I accidentally ran into one of the guys who had been hitting on me on my way to the mall near my estate. He’d then texted me that I was really beautiful and he wanted to meet me again but I could not register that. I never really saw my beauty during those years when all I focused on was not making the mistake of letting people see my overbite and misaligned teeth.

I wish I could give pre-teen and teenage me a warm hug, tell her she was and still is beautiful, and actually have her believe it. If only I could hug her when she finally managed to put up a picture of her smiling with her teeth out almost seven years later, trembling all through it, harbouring mixed feelings at the small victory she had gotten against herself, fighting against deleting it. If I could hold her hand as her heart quickened with her secret as she took a group photo at her high school graduation ceremony, forcefully smiling and feeling wary of the photo she still has in her bedroom drawer, wondering if the photographer wondered why her teeth looked like that. Feeling immature at the irrationality of her feelings being directed by a years-old comment and being quite unkind to herself. If I could reassure her when she was asked why she does not smile like everyone else; chuckling and brushing the question aside despite its heaviness, its absolute mammoth weight which sat on her head and suffocated her with all the things she could not express because of the rust that clogged the gates to her expression due to their closure for so many years. All the light-hearted comments weighing down on her for hours after the interactions, trembling, being unable to breathe because of the fear of being discovered. The fear of being seen for what she truly was.

I would like to say I came to a grand epiphany that ended up ‘fixing’ me but that would be false. At sixteen, I slowly realized that I was beautiful and started believing it and feeling joy at it. I started seeing my beauty outside of the beauty standards I had harshly been putting myself up against. Being darker, slimmer, and generally smaller than average stopped feeling like a burden to me and I no longer felt like I stuck out like a sore thumb. I realized that I didn’t view other people similar to me as not beautiful but was simply being hard on myself. It also dawned on me how hard my body had been working to keep me alive despite everything. This awareness did not magically cure me of my insecurity. Similar to when I realized the state of my teeth, I had such a moment of awareness too at sixteen. I looked at myself in the mirror and stared for a long while. Smiled at myself despite feeling strange. Nobody had died from witnessing me smile and so I was not a horrible person in that regard.

On my seventeenth September, I gradually found freedom from my teeth. Freedom from the shame that I carried in my body from judging myself, freedom from the comment in 2013. Freedom too from being so unkind to myself for so long.

My deep overbite often gave me trouble with eating and I was constantly at the dentist for this or that so I needed treatment for it as well. I was sixteen too, almost seventeen, when I started seeing my orthodontist. Surprisingly, I do not associate my joy and acceptance with my treatment despite it being the most obvious answer. Without conscious introspection on why I felt the way I did as well as learning from other experiences that shaped my general outlook, I’d have probably weaved myself a story on how getting treatment reinforced just how fake I was. Because of this, my treatment was just something then; a procedure happening to my mouth and my teeth. I experienced less strangeness smiling with my misaligned teeth even though the treatment had just begun. A part of me owes the quickness of this to the awareness that I was getting treatment.

I am now twenty-one. I often smile in my photos with my teeth out and feel no heaviness at it, only joy. Simple elation at the things that cause me to smile. My joy bubbles out of me as it wishes and I let it. It’s quite the task to express just how enormous of a burden was lifted off my shoulders when I was finally able to smile and laugh freely. The journey from then up to this point, about five years now, has been characterised by relapses to the state I was in. I have still found myself with strange feelings while taking pictures and I also naturally gravitate towards giving my close-mouthed smile. I’ve been asked a couple of times too why I do not smile. Habit at this point I assume, it just comes naturally. Earlier on, a part of me desired so often to sit the people who questioned me on this down and narrate the whole saga, explaining that I was still taking baby steps towards being more open about it. I wanted to tell them that I would smile in that way of my own volition. That urge escaped me a while back when I realised it really does not matter. I brush aside the comments and express my joy however I feel is best and with no guilt clouding me.

I still feel a renewed sense of joy whenever I catch myself smiling or laughing open-mouthed. I celebrate a little in my head — free from the burden, free from the heaviness of a smile.