Rememory

I was looking through old drafts of blog posts, and I found this one. Apparently I never posted it, or, if I did, I went to edit it later and never put it back up. An essay from my junior year of high school.

I am in their house, his house, but the doors are twice my height. My sisters wear large pink dresses, layers of tulle bursting around their legs. They wobble about, unable to support their heavy crowns. Although I must stand on tiptoes to see over the couch, the dresses are too small. I leave the other girls and go upstairs, looking for him. I find him using the computer in the kitchen. I sit next to him, on the same chair but barely touching, and he shows me how to fight with animated soldiers.

He races up the hill in my backyard and I chase him, trying to release the competitive spirit that he has been coaxing from me all night. He trips over a tree root and slows, I slam into him, we tumble down. He catches himself on his elbows before landing above me, but his leg still comes down on mine and I groan. I look down, trying to disentangle, and I see his pale, pale arms, glowing in the barely-there moonlight.

The moon is above us, and we are silhouetted in its light. I dance down the middle of the street, ignoring the glass shards in my hand, forgetting that I’m leaving tomorrow. I dangle the spicy mint he wants so badly in front of his face before snatching it away as he lunges and I twirl down the street, singing “mine, mine, mine.” He gives up, returning to the sidewalk, but I continue to twirl and joy under the dull moon. Then he is beside me, grabbing me, pulling me over and a car runs by so fast I can barely see it, so close I can almost touch it. He saves me. Our mothers say that now we have to get married, like the rescued damsels in distress do in all the stories, and our blushes are hidden by the dangerous darkness. I still do not give him the mint.

We are back, before it all, in Iona, where the beach is close and the tide closer. My sister hit him earlier, and he didn’t hit her back, because he never hurt anyone, not back then. He has taught me to fight the way I could, has taught me not to flinch from pain by hurling ping-pong ball after ping-pong ball right at me, but would never hit a girl, would never hurt a soul, would always save my life. I trust his goodness. Our families are on the couches, spread out and close together, and we play a card game that is more laughing than thinking. I am wet for the first time. I notice, but I don’t know what it means. When I go to the bathroom later, there is a bloody spot on the inside of his basketball shorts, the ones I wear because my luggage is lost. My mother gives me Motrin and a bulky pad and cleans the shorts and tells me that I am a woman now, and I wear her sweatpants to bed and think but I am still twelve, and I am confused by all this growing up when all I really want is to play another round of cards.

I lie in bed that night in a room with my sisters but in my own bed because now I am special, now I am old. I realize, as the last bit of wakefulness leaves me, that my body has just told me that it is ready for sex, for love, for children. I try to picture it, but I don’t know how. The next day, I examine the books in the house until I find one with vivid sex scenes, perfectly specific, and I read until I can see it in my head and have to put the book down because the image disgusts me.

I am fifteen now and he is naked, above me around me within me, sweating, panting, shaking arms dark and glowing in the dim lamplight. I toss and turn, the visual plaguing me even though it has not happened and is based entirely on imaginings, but it makes my insides warm in a way that no other dreams do, and I decide not to chase it away.

It is snowing, and he is at my house, and we chase and run with a flock of children, throwing snowballs, and I see him break a window but he doesn’t know I saw. When the window is found later, no one ever knows that it was him. He wrestles his sister who is less than half his size after she calls him weak and emasculated and worthless. He is pushing her, tugging her, pinning her down with the arms that hold him over above within me. She claws at him, writhes, but cannot escape, and he tries to smother her with a pillow. I scream.

I can never marry him, never be with him, says my mother, because he is angry and only knows how to hit. That’s what comes of having a father like his.

I am sprawled across a couch in my basement, the gangling limbs that I’ve finally come to control and love and cherish stretching all the way from armrest to armrest. He is seated on the other couch, joystick in his hands, voice calm, steering an animated car around and around an animated track, destroying competitor after competitor as he tells me that he and his girlfriend broke up because he got angry and didn’t know what to do, that it just comes out, that, that now he’s not allowed to drive because his mother saw him hit his sister. “I don’t know why it happens,” he tells me, looking only at the television. “I can’t control it, can’t see it coming, I just get angry, sometimes.”

He breaks things.

We stand in the lights of the subway car, close together although it is late and the car is empty, falling into each other with each bump and curve and turn and stop. His eyes go transparent, the pale green-blue washed out by the bright bright lights, and I can see through him and into him and he is mine and I love him and I want him but I know he is not safe.

I bike down roads less than a mile from home but they are foreign now. I go faster and faster, imagining monsters on my tail, fighting to get away, fighting the urge to go to his house and throw rocks at his window and cry that I want him and need him and beg him to hold me. I cannot go there, cannot do that, cannot let him know because even if he loves me, even if he wants me, I cannot have him. I pedal, and I cry, and I pray, seriously for the first time in my life, that this hurt can go away, that this love can run its course and leave me because I am too feeble to fight him and to weak to let go. I must not love a boy who is dangerous.

Aphorisms, Adages, and Amazement

No person is born evil. They are shaped by the events around them, the environments they are raised in. Villains are not born sadists; their minds are twisted and tormented by innumerable painful events.

The destiny of children is also independent from their parents. In The Scarlet Pimpernel (sink me!), Sir Percy works to save fallen noblemen and their children. Although in many cases their parents repressed the working class, the children haven't done the same sins and don't deserve to die. This is a painfully obvious point, but it is one that I will back up using literature because apparently that's what the cool kids are doing these days. In A Tale of Two Cities Charles Darney is a fine upstanding man despite his asshole rapist of a dad.

Madame Defarge, the characteristic evil mastermind, clicking her needles as she knits the death of a generation, is just the opposite, a woman born ordinary but warped into an evil mastermind. She was a force against good, but she was forged into that shape by the trials of revolutionary France. Then there are some quotes about wind and fire and other fun stuff, and this was a boring essay.

Ah, well. Cest' la vie, or whatever the hell that is.

Beloved has been growing on me

Somehow.

Oddly.

Very, very oddly.

We have a bit of a love-hate relationship, Beloved and I. I love the narrative style, the strange mix of what was with what wasn’t, what is with what isn’t. I love the way it mostly follows a straight storyline, then changes its mind and twists and bends and turns. There’s something about the unexpectedness that makes me pay just a little bit more attention, like a plot twist, but fascinating as opposed to exciting.

My qualm with the book is how emotionally draining it is to read it. Yes, it is designed to provoke sadness, but if it causes so much hurt that the reader stops moving forward, then it’s undermined its own position. Reading a book should not lead me to think of masochism. Yet, the more I’ve read, the less the pain within has bothered me.

There’s some odd beauty in its undulations. I didn’t really see this until it took a sudden dive into the two “I am Beloved and she is mine” chapters. I read the first one at night, before bed, and I went to sleep with “a hot thing” echoing between my ears. When I finally chased it away, I was left with repeating pairs of words, words not even in the chapter itself but that still were stuck, reverberating, inescapable.

The next morning I went on to the poem chapter. I don’t know that it’s actually a poem, since I liked it, and I don’t tend to like poems, but these lines had voices, the same repetitiveness that characterizes Beloved, and words that felt like baby-talk, almost. Words that lacked meaning and yet had twice as much. It’s funny, really. I still have trouble reading the book, sitting down and digging in and immersing myself, but I can still see it, in my head, and it’s becoming beautiful.

Rememory

What do I have that is worth re-remembering, worth breaking apart into a thousand tiny fragments of perspective, of me and mine and ours and more, until the story itself becomes almost entirely kind of partway obscured by the words, and most certainly blocked out by strength of feeling.

It's a big assignment, to write something emotional, something enjoyable. Weirdly, I want to do the depression again, to pick it apart from my own view as well as Nyx's and Gretchen's and Amy's. It's just, last time I wrote about it, I became a complete bitch in the process. And, last time I wrote it, it turned me into a crying, angry bitch who screamed at her mother for offenses committed long ago. To top it off, it was for the same teacher I have now, but with two years less of maturity and knowledge and words behind me. Gray is still it, to me, though. That's how it was before, colorless, and I don't know how to write it with color. It's gray, my memory of sadness.

And yet, what is my memory of happiness. I look back for a happy moment, look back for something, and I know their was contentment, know there was joy and excitement and happy and love and hope, but what stands out, what can be reconsidered and rewritten and torn apart and pieced back together and made into a creation that is no longer purely the memory but is more?

Nyx just said "getting ridiculous test scores." Could I do a rememory of the SAT, of the scores, of the pain and the pressure finally exploding like a bottle of champagne into pure joy? But, even that isn't all happy. It's happiness tinged, tilted by effort, a mistrust of tests, a feeling that even though the numbers say I'm better than just about everyone else, I'm not better, or I am, but not enough, or not in the right ways, or something, because always, always always always there is this pressure, this urge to do better.

Even the happy has been destroyed by the pressure.

Is this what it is, to be an overachiever? Is that what I am now, no more semi about it? Have I outgrown the title that began this? I can't have. After all, I still sleep eight hours a night. I still stress over little tiny details like essays.

And yet, why isn't there anything happy. Why can't I find happy? It's as if everything I have right now is colored, hopefully just by my headache. Maybe when I try again, in the morning, I'll have a memory worth remembering.

This is the problem, I think, by choosing to avoid depression by constantly looking to the future. The present can be difficult to stomach. The past can be impossible to confront.

I promise to be less emo tomorrow.

Book Lists

Here is Crazy's list of books that would, ideally, be taught in a high school. Here are those which I have read, or will read:

-The Odyssey, unfortunately

-selections from The Canterbury Tales are next year

-so is The Scarlet Letter

-selections from Emerson, but at church, not school.

-selections from Thoreau, although I read Walden during the summer.

-Little Woman, but I read that, for myself, in elementary school

-Jane Eyre, a summer book, again.

-A Tale of Two Cities, in sophomore English

-Romeo and Juliet, Othello, and A Midsummer Night's Dream

-The Sun Also Rises, which I'm midway through. Also, Crazy wrote the following: "I like it better than A Farewell to Arms and HUGELY better than that stupid story where he chases around the fish." I agree with her whole-heartedly.

-The Great Gatsby, which I read this fall

-a short story by Woolf

I'm rather appalled that she didn't include Catcher in the Rye, which really ought to be on any list, in my opinion.

I also found a list here of thirty books everyone should read before their 30th birthday:

1. Sidartha- from what I've heard, I'll pass, although it supposedly helps on SATs.
2. 1984- I should probably read that one eventually.
3. To Kill A Mockingbird- I read it in eighth grade, and, to be honest, I think it's a bit overrated.
4. A Clockwork Orange- would have been better if Otis hadn't spoilt it.
5. For Whom the Bell Tolls- it's Hemingway, and not Old Man and Sea, so maybe I'd like it
6. War and Peace- sounds long and painful
7. The Rights of Man- is written by Paine. More or less pain than War and Peace?
8. The Social Contract- Rousseau. This is not a novel. I will not read it.
9. One Hundred Years of Solitude- anything that "does not have a plot in the traditional sense" does not seem as if it will be a great deal of fun.
10. The Origin of Species- well, that might actually be fun.
11. The Wisdom of the Desert- sounds like something my mom would read before forcing a new supplement on me.
12. The Tipping Point- Malcolm Gladwell. Can I leave it at Outliers?
13. The Wind in the Willows- never heard of it. Sounds nice, though
14. The Art of War- military strategy. blech.
15. The Lord of the Rings- I've read some. Vastly overrated, again.
16. David Copperfield- I started it and liked it, but we read it in school next year, so I didn't want to do the whold thing.
17. Four Quartets- poetry? I'll pass.
18. Catch-22- this I'd rather like to read.
19. The Great Gatsby- been there, done that.
20. The Catcher in the Rye- see #19
21. Crime and Punishment- sounds foreign and confusing. What fun!
22. The Prince- Machiavell. Will probably destroy my optimistic worldview
23. Walden- I read it. Loved it. Highly recommend it.
24. The Republic- Plato. Not a novel. "Gripping and enduring" makes it sound like bad sex.
25. Lolita- this I'd like to read.
26. Getting Things Done- self help. I'd really rather not.
27. How to Win Friends and Influence People- more self help. And it sounds snooty.
28. Lord of the Flies- I've always wanted to read that one.
29. The Grapes of Wrath- I'm sorry, but I really just don't like Steinbeck.
30. The Master and Margarita- Emily read this, our teacher hadn't heard of it, but it's apparently quite good.

Yay books! Yay reading! Now, back to Hemingway.

Electrocution

is really, really fun. I know I've told all of you about it already, but, really, I want to record this for posterity, seeing as it was, you know, completely f**king awesome.

Yes, the two asterisks are necessary. Just as necessary as they were last week when somebody modified my science research paper to say some very rude things about my mother. Then again, they said f***e. I'm still not sure what the "e" is for.

So, today in physics, Mr. Mubble comes in with a giant metal ball on a big plexiglass stick ("Oh," said Kathrya, when I told her this. "Was it...big?"). "This," said Mubbs, "is a Van de Graaff generator."

Mr. Mubble poked at the generator and asked, "has anybody ever been electrocuted?"

"On a lamp," I said. "It hurt."

"Me too!" said Umber. "Well, it was basically a lamp, but it, like, wasn't making light, and I was going to change the bulb, so I put my thumb in the socket, but there wasn't a bulb."

"Did you get shocked?" probed Mubbs.

"Well it hurt a lot, so, like, yeah."

Nobody bothered to ask why she bothered to put her thumb in it anyways.

Then Dino went into his bit about sticking a paperclip into a socket in eighth grade (I always knew he was daft), but Caroline started telling me her electrocution story, about a live wire she had to plug into a high voltage lamp for Les Mis, at the same time.

Mr. Mubble wanted a demonstration of what happens when people get charged up. I was selected as the participant because my hair is relatively thin and of a good length. Sergio tried to get a chant going of "Tea, Tea, Tea," but he was, per usual, unsuccessful, and it didn't take much persuasion anyways.

Becca brought over a bunch of textbooks for me to stand on so that I couldn't discharge into the ground. Apparently, that's really uncomfortable, although it seems doubtful that something could be more uncomfortable than getting charged up. I stood on the stack of books, making Mr. Mubbles, who is already shorter than me, look diminutive.

"Put your hands on it," he said.

I slowly extended my hands and touched my fingertips to the metal surface.

"It'll go faster if you add your palms."

I flattened my hands. I stood still for a few seconds, the entire class watching. "Oh my god, my arms are tingling," I said.

Mubbs laughed. "Do you want to stop?"

"No, I'm good, it's just kind of....weird."

Mr. Mubble said some stuff about the science behind it, with me interrupting every few seconds with relevant statements such as "I think my shirt is sticking to me."

"That's supposed to happen." He looked over the progress of the charge. "A few more seconds and your hair should start to stand up. I wonder if we'll get it all the way over your head."

"Wonderful," I responded with a grimace. Predictable, I could see my hair starting to curl up at the edge of my vision a few moments later.

The class started laughing. I stayed there for a while longer, my hair on end, until Mr. Mubble declared me fully charged.

"Anyone want to discharge her?"

Dino, who'd been inching further away from the generator with every minute, scooted backwards another half a foot.

"I'll do it," said Tybalt.

I reached towards him a bit, but I was afraid to touch anything, so he ended up standing and reaching out. I touched his knuckle with the tip of my pointer finger and yelped.

The class laughed.

"Ow!"

"Do it again," said Mr. Mubbles. "She might not be fully discharged."

It hurt more the second time. I squeaked and moved backwards, falling off the books. "That hurt!"

"You might want to touch something metal to get rid of the rest," said Mubbles.

I reached cautiously towards the board and squealed again when I heard the zapping noise and lost some more electrons. I still hurt. I was afraid to do it again, so I went back to my desk. When I sat down, I got shocked again, eliciting another yelp followed by another laugh.

What to say?

I am extremely dead. Very dead. So dead that I may soon keel over sideways and have maggots crawl out of my ears. Ew, maggots. Oh, shit, I'm triggering an episode. I can feel them crawling, up and down my spine, wriggling about my wrists, working their way up over my ankle and across the inside of my knee and when I turn around I know they're going to be filling my room in a giant mass of-

Deep breaths. In. Out. In. Out.

Whenever I begin to think that I'm emotionally stable, something like this happens, and I'm forced to reevaluate.

I blame the stress.

A long, relatively boring day

Rufus is in awful condition, again. It makes me nauseous just to look at him, so I'm not eating enough because he's in the kitchen, and he's sick, which is sad, and the whole thing is pretty much just a steaming pile of awful.

I ought to write something meaningful here. I ought to be able to come up with something worth reading. However, all I can really manage is a whimper of emotional and physical pain.

Woe is me.

Suffering

I am currently suffering from extensive eye make-up damage from being all dolled up as an emo for our health PSA. Nia may be really good with make-up, but I still consider it majorly unfun. Maybe I'm just oversensitive.

Of course, being oversensitive would make me emo by nature, no?

I Can Make a Difference

You asked, so here it is.

I stood precariously on a wall overlooking the ocean. The sky was a flat gray, and there was a strong and chilly wind. The entire world seemed to be tinted gray; the only color left was the tan of the sand and the greenish gray of the ocean water. It was the sort of setting a movie would have for a suicide, and, at that moment, I wanted my life to end. It is by far the most terrifying moment of my fourteen years of existence.

The first person I tried to tell was my mother. Through tears, I told her that I thought about bad things, that I might be depressed, that I needed help. She responded by telling me that I should exercise to get more endorphins and feel better. I ran up and down stairs, but there was no improvement. Telling her the first time had been so painful that was not willing to go through it again, so I attempted to wait it out. Two weeks later, I was getting worse, and she seemed to have completely forgotten about my problem.

I spoke again, balanced precariously on the edge of a bathroom sink. I began to speak, the words slipping through the tears. My friend looked on, concerned, not understanding why I was crying. "I almost, I almost." I was sobbing so much that a gasp worked its way into my words, but I forced them out. "Killed myself." She was shocked. I continued my story, filling in the details, explaining that I did not know why, that I did not know if it would happen again, that right then I did not want to die. I was scared out of my mind. I was shaking, and the automatic sink behind me went off, spraying my pants with water. I cried even harder. She asked if I wanted to go to the guidance office. My guidance counselor, a creepy old man who didn't even know my name, was not someone I wanted to explain this to, so I shook my head no. My friend promised to keep my secret, and we returned to lunch, me with tears on my face, hers expressing her uncertainty as to what she could do to help.

A week later, I stood in the shower under the pounding hot water, fear flooding through me, trying to let the heat and the noise drown out my sadness and loneliness. I clearly remembered the feeling of standing on that wall. It hit me that I would need only seconds to slit my wrists and finish what I had considered beginning. A battle was raging in my mind. "You don't want that" screamed between my ears, but a little fragment managed to worm its way through the noise, whispering seductively of how easy it would be to let it all go. I rand from the piece, hiding beneath the shower, but running from myself I couldn't get very far. The conflict built to unbearable levels in my mind, so I shoved my fingers into my mouth, biting down so hard that my gums began to ached, trying to give myself a tangible reason to hurt and to make the pain and sadness fade with the marks on my knuckles, just as they had so many times before. This time it didn't help. I sank down to the bottom of the shower and promised myself that Tuesday, tomorrow, I would tell.

I had written about that colorless afternoon no the wall near the ocean. It was a poem in which I tried to figure out how to put my pain into words that people could read and possibly understand. It was scribbled in my worst handwriting in the back of my science notebook. It was accompanied by footnotes and doodles in the margins, everything I felt was needed to explain. The next day I showed it to another friend, one who also wrote poems, not mentioning that it was autobiographical. She said it was creepy but well written. I had promised myself I would tell, so I whispered to her that I was the suicidal girl in the poem. She urged me to go to guidance. It took her about fifteen minutes to talk me into it. We sat across from someone I did not know, a counselor for another grade. I handed her my poem; she called my parents. I was suspended from school for being a danger to myself and others, pending a letter from a mental health professional. I felt worse than I had before.

I saw someone the next day who gave me a letter to get back in school. It was another two and a half weeks before I finally started seeing a therapist and was allowed to close my bedroom door.

A few weeks ago, that second friend moved away. I was walking home from school and trying to console myself. I reminded myself that she was just and friend, and that, without her, I'd still be in the same place I was that day. It was then I realized that I was completely wrong. She brought me in. I have no idea where I'd be if I hadn't gotten help. It could be that I would have found another way, but I could just as easily be dead. She was gone, but I was so lucky to have had her there, and to have been able to survive. I was lucky, and I felt the good luck wash over me in a wave incomparable to the pain in the shower. I was alive, I was happy. I was walking through the first snow of the year, a snow I came so close to never being able to see. I breathed in the flakes and yelled out to a street silenced by ice, "I survived!" "But," I added inwardly, "only just." It was five weeks after I first told my mother that I got help, and I was troubled long before then. I may not have scars on my wrists, but I had a problem, and it is far more common than one might guess. Approximately one in every hundred and fourteen teenagers injures themselves. For some of these teens, five weeks may be too long.

I think mainly it was so difficult for me to get help because people do not really know what to do. I think my mother may have denied the problem, although we don't talk about it at all now, so I'm not sure. Gretchen tried to be a good friend by keeping my secret. Amy finally brought me in, but I was only placed in the care of my denying parents again. People need to be educated about what they can do to help in these situations.

I can make a difference in the world by telling my story and educating people about what they can do to help. Self-injuring and suicide are topics I have yet to cover in health class. I think that some who have not experienced it misinterpret it as a plea for attention, thinking that because people are hurting themselves, they alone are to blame. I do not believe that this is true. No one wants to hurt, and causing physical pain is not a healthy way to deal with painful emotions.

People can be healed. It was six months later, summer, that I saw that I was truly better. The permeating sadness that had hung over me seemed inexplicable gone. I was lying on a hill at music camp. The sun was beating into the back of my jeans, but rather than feeling too hot, I was pleasantly warm. Scales and songs wafted through the breeze, discordant as they mixed together, but rather than being annoying, it was soothing. I smiled into the warm grass, thinking about the friends I would see later, the music I would learn to play, and the new school that I would start in the fall. The warmth of the sun felt as if it had permeated my entire being. It took me a moment to find a word for the unfamiliar feeling: contentment. The happiness in life had come back to me. My life wasn't any better, but I was.

By using what I learned from my own experience, I can help others to feel the same contentment I am now able to feel. I am starting here. This piece of writing is not private. I am spilling out my story because it needs to be learned from. Suicide is the third leading cause of death among adolescents and young adults, but suicides can be prevented. Students need to be able to tell people more easily, and those whom they tell need to learn what they should do to help.

I am a living, breathing example that it can get better when troubled teens talk, but the people they talk to also need to know what to do. I had to talk to two people before I found one who was willing to help me stick around, so that I can taste snowflakes and feel sunlight, but many people are not so lucky. I can make a difference by speaking up, so I am going to talk.

The DMV call center is a bitch. It took FOREVER, but I finally got an appointment on September 19th. In other news, who wants to go see Harry Potter on Saturday night?

Punchline

A brief English class transcript

Tea: Richard! You were in my dream this weekend!

Richard: I was?

Tea: Yeah, you were trying to kill me.

Richard: Oh. Well, dreams do come true sometimes.

Tea: *Laughs awkwardly.*

Richard: *walks away*

Tybalt (Bryant's twin): Ow!

Tea: Hahaha! Gemma, look, Dino hit Tybalt in the head with a book!

Tybalt: What was that for?

Dino: I missed

Tea: That was definitely an untethered projectile

Gemma: Haha, what?

Tea: ASR joke. There is no one from ASR in this class, so it wasn't really funny...

Gemma: Oh.

Mrs. Leon: Okay, we have cows, but they aren't our cows.

Tybalt: I told Dino that, but he didn't listen.

Dino (with computer on desk): Heh.

Caroline: Can I have a cow now?

The Continuing Adventures of Me and My Two Too Large Feet

Today, while getting off the bus, I tripped over the side of my seat, then, when going down the stairs, I nearly face-planted. Nicky, who was the only kid on the bus at the time, gave me an incredulous look. I don't care what she thinks- I truly am that clumsy.

In other news, this site is hilarious. I'm partial to "Today, I stumbled. I looked around but no one saw me. I was still embarrassed. MLIA."

That site is almost as good as this one.

Now, I'm going to go write a U.S. history reflection about how it feels to get a 2. I'm going to milk all of the pain, suffering and personal growth that I possibly can out of that low grade.

Teeth Whitening

When I was twelve, I had a root canal on my right front tooth. Ever since then, the tooth has been overly bleached, and the root is gray and dead looking. However, I can't see it myself, and my friends say it isn't particularly noticeable. My mother, on the other hand, can't stand it.

I don't really care, but it'd be expensive to fix, and I figure I might as well do it while my parents are the ones paying, so I let her take me to a cosmetic dentist. They gave me whitening gel that I rarely use (but had an effect, as can be seen in the left pic), and when my teeth eventually reach the prescribed whiteness, I'll have to get a veneer.

I know the problems with appearance could hold me back in the workplace, but is one gray tooth really going to make that much of a difference? Also, I watch America's Next Top Model- Joanie taught me that veneers are extremely painful. I don't really want to get one, but I probably still will.

One thing that really bothered me was that when I went in for a consultation about the one tooth, the dentist started in with other ways that she could improve my smile, like burning off the gum above one of my canines to make my teeth look more even. I feel like the next thing will be collagen injections, then botox, then boob jobs- it's a slippery slope.

I don't want a boob job.