The toothache

I have a toothache.

I could say it came on Wednesday night but it didn’t.

I could say it came on over the past week. It didn’t.

It came on over a very long time - so long, I honestly have no idea how long it has been. It isn’t just that I don’t remember; I mean, I don’t… but it is more that it belongs to a whole class of issues that “just had to wait”.

It has been more than months… A year? Years? I don’t know.

When I was younger, I used to have these diametrically opposed thoughts that my life was either going to be charmed or cursed. It would either be easy with the good fortune of someone lucky to the point of blessed or hard to the point of someone unduly punished.

At times, it has seemed like each.

In my 20’s, I was a climber. I had a career in a field in which excelled. I moved up easily and often. I became Director and then Vice President and then Senior Vice President. I was worked directly for the COO and CEO. I had a “big role” in a way that means you are in line for more. An heir to bigger.

I spent less and less of my time on the work I liked and more and more with executives above me who ate well and dressed well and flew private.

I was at the cusp of what I had believed I wanted: to run a firm myself.

While the trappings were heady stuff, the closer I got to what I had imagined as “making it” the less it seemed like “the brass ring” to me.

The CEO was wealthy beyond what anyone would need. A few years prior, in the space of only six months, he had made 75 million dollars from the sale of the company. The amount ballooned to $100 million by the time the deal closed. The COO had been the banker who orchestrated the deal. If he hadn’t been a millionaire before, he certainly was one afterwards.

I tagged along with them on business trips and stayed at hotels I could never afford. I stole the hangers and kept the soap.

And then we were in Santa Monica holed up in a lovely hotel on the beach. The CEO was sick and wanted to just order room service and meet in his suite. He ordered soup. I don’t remember if I ate.

What I remember was asking him if “it still felt special”. All of this. The beautiful suites in beautiful hotels. The flying private instead of commercial.

He looked at me like he didn’t understand the question. So, I rephrased it in a way I knew he would understand. He was a wine guy. Always had been. But since the sale, his tastes had gone up many, many levels from ordering wines good enough to get a nod of recognition from a waiter to ordering ones that brought out the sommelier with a decanter.

“Does it still feel special? That GREAT bottle of wine… Does it still taste as good?”

Through the congestion of his cold, between spoonfuls of room service soup, he said, in an almost resigned way “No, not really.”

And I knew he meant it.

Whatever you have just becomes your normal. No matter how much or how little that might be, beyond worrying about having a roof over your head and having enough to eat, whatever you have just becomes your normal. Even when that normal is more than you ever imagined. Or less.

So, I had gotten an up close look at the disillusioning reality of having money. It’s amazing. And then it is nice. And then it is normal.

Surely there was more that came with the money though. The travel; the ability to take your family anywhere; do anything; be in the stands at any game or concert; get any table; meet anyone.

And there was indeed some of that. The CEO owned a ski house in Aspen; played golf with Michael Jordan; opened a nightclub… The COO met celebrities and dabbled in music.

From the outside, they looked the part of what we imagine comes with extreme wealth. Beyond the American Dream, this was winning PowerBall.

I was inside the ropes though and also saw what they had once the plane landed back at home and the driver pulled away.

They were in miserable marriages. Their spouses didn’t miss them when they were gone and weren’t happy to see them come home. They were serial cheaters. Whether their spouses knew, I don’t know. I’m not sure they would have cared. They shared a house more than a marriage.

And their kids hated them. They missed not just important moments in their kids’ childhoods but the entirety of them altogether. At first, it was because they hadn’t cared enough to prioritize their kids. Then it was because they had forged no connection and built no relationship until eventually they weren’t welcome or missed.

Brass ring.

That was the brass ring right there.

It wasn’t for me. Within a year of starting working with them, I managed to get myself fired without bad feelings on anyone’s part; took a severance; and then spent all of it. I have stamps in my passport and photo albums. I still appreciate good wine.

I never got back on that treadmill. Worked but without aspiring for that life.

By the time my son was born, I had gone out on my own. Never worked for an employer again.

By the time he was 2, I was separated and then divorced. I had 50-50 custody and then more than that. He was my priority. He still is.

I chose to “work to live” and have been there ever since.

(We’re getting back to the whole toothache thing.)

The working-to-live thing was not easy. I had taken a massive, massive paycut. I had kept all of the same expenses. The same little house bought at the wrong time. The same bills. I just didn’t have the same income.

So, I cut and cut and cut… and then had some bad breaks and lost some income and had some missed checks… and drifted closer and closer to having nothing left.

It was a sort of erosion. Financial hardship is like a chronic illness of sorts. At first, it’s just a flu. You cancel plans or cut back or drop things. But you still largely have the overall shape of your life and in your mind, that prior version is still your life.

And then, the longer it goes on, the more you have to pare back and the more little crises you have to triage and manage. You change your lifestyle but it still feels like adjusting to an inability to do what you used to do by circumstance rather than a life change.

And then, as things erode further, you run out of discretionary things to cut and are left with only things you would have previously thought were all mandatory.

How easy or hard those choices are depends on how much you care about the consequences. Some choices affect you. Some affect others. You don’t make the decisions as much as your priorities do. How much you care about who is affected makes the decisions for you.

Right or wrong, healthy or not, I was just wired to think that it is my job to provide my son with the healthiest childhood I can. The most emotionally healthiest. Not the most comfortable or easiest. The one that comes with the least baggage to someday unpack. The one that would insulate him from having to try as an adult to repair things in the way of his happiness.

That made the choices incredibly easy. They weren’t even choices. I couldn’t NOT choose what I chose.

Those consequences were a decade-long erosion of doing without or putting off things I would have once thought were just mandatory like groceries and electric bills and car insurance.

I explain this both so people who have been through similar can feel seen and so people who haven’t can maybe come to understand something more foreign than they probably imagine.

So, I chiseled away. My glasses prescription became outdated. I did without them. I still had contact lenses. I wore them longer so I didn’t have to replace them. I chipped a tooth. I didn’t get it fixed.

I postponed and canceled and postponed and canceled. Anything that could wait which affected only me waited. And “It can wait.” meant it would wait forever. There would never be a time when something that wasn’t a crisis when it arose and hadn’t become one would suddenly move to the front of the line.

If you have never had a protracted period of deep, serious, financial struggle, this may not make sense to you as a concept:

Those decisions start as financial and then become psychological. Not emotional. Psychological.

Barely getting by is at first a process - a budget exercise - but then it becomes a mindset until it literally rewires your very brain.

In the early going, you’re trying to spin plates while thinking you may be able to keep any from dropping. And then some drop. And them some more drop. And then something big and unexpected happens and you realize you have to choose a bunch to let drop.

And it is that last moment, the unexpected thing that forces you to have to choose a whole bunch of plates to let fall that changes things.

You hadn’t been prepared for it and that was the problem. Even though the reason was because you didn’t have enough to manage all the plates as it was and certainly didn’t have extra to squirrel away, you had been caught flatfooted.

So, you become more hypervigilant about “the unexpected” and deprioritize anything - anything - that costs a lot or might. You cannot risk expensive surprises. So, even things you could have potentially tucked in get pushed off into the “have to wait” pile if there is a chance they might be more expensive than planned.

And this brings me back to my tooth. It is a molar. The back one. Years ago, it got a little loose. Maybe I was grinding my teeth. Maybe it was a problem. It didn’t hurt. It seemed to resolve itself. It could wait. So, it did. And then it became periodically problematic but not so much that I couldn’t ignore it. It could wait. So, it did.

A week ago, it seemed looser than it had been at moments in the past. And then it started to hurt. And then it hurt a lot. And then I had little more than soup for a couple days and it wasn’t better and maybe now it couldn’t wait. But, it did.

Right now, at this moment, I can afford to have it fixed. I have enough money to be able to see someone and have them fix it… and then have them tick off other “it can waits” which aren’t crises now but shouldn’t be left until they are.

So, begrudgingly, and unhappily, I will. A good friend from childhood who is a dentist is opening his practice tomorrow so I can come in.

And I can tell you, with the full weight of my soul, even not being to chew on one side of my mouth rests more easily on me than walking into a bill of unknown size that will likely be larger than a slew of other bills put together.

Broken plates are broken plates. Focusing on one big one has meant letting a bunch of little ones fall for so long, it is literally wired into my brain to hang onto the money even when the little ones are spinning just fine and still will be.

The thing people who have never struggled to get by don’t understand is that it literally alters your brain.

There is a saying related to brain function and the way our adaptive minds come to serve us and sometimes haunt us:

The constant worry. The endless, sleepless hypervigilance. The agonizing scenario-planning. It literally rewires the pathways in your brain until that old life of yours… it only doesn’t exist anymore, you wouldn’t even experience it the same if it suddenly did.

Those repeated thoughts. The things you think over and over and over for long stretches, they aren’t just images flashing across a screen. They are transmissions along pathways that start off as just worn down grass across a field and then wire and formalize and harden until they are the paved road along which all of your thinking travels.

There was a time in my life when my friends and I all “invested” in a friend’s independent film mostly because we wanted to support him despite knowing it was more donation than investment.

Now, I truly can’t remember what it even felt like to be able to just get an “it can wait” fixed when it arises without deep, uncomfortable feelings about pulling money out of the well of hypervigilance.

And while this will make absolutely no sense to anyone who hasn’t been sufficiently broke to the point of not being able to see the light at either end of the tunnel - not the end you came from nor the one you’re moving towards - I am more comfortable with this fucked up tooth and just sucking it up and putting it off - pain and all - than I am with the knowledge that after tomorrow, it will either be resolved or on its way.

That. That right there. That is the poisonous, cancerous reality of the impact of poverty. It is being so experienced with the pain of things you cannot control or manage or bear that you literally prefer certain, continued, literal physical pain over the toxic helplessness and fear that addressing it might make whatever comes next even worse.

I have a toothache.

But mostly, I have a brain that is wired to prefer it to the consequences of fixing it.

I am very thankful that I can afford to go get it fixed tomorrow. I am thankful that, at this moment at least, I don’t have to worry that it will be at the expense of several other plates.

Being entirely unfiltered and raw with you though, leaning into a big expense hurts in a way that isn’t financial and can’t just be self-talked away.

Once neurons have fired together and then wired together, they are the road.

They were adaptive and protective… and now, they are playground slides back down into a trauma that really doesn’t go away just because you can afford the bill now.

We talk about ‘struggling’ as if it is just a statement of temporary financial condition… as if it goes away with a deposit.

It isn’t. It changes you. It fundamentally changes you and how you think.

Sometimes, that makes it hard to do things that sound easy like going to get a toothache fixed.

Other times though, it makes it easy to do things that sound hard - like laying yourself bare and putting down in words all of your wounds and weaknesses - because spending time on embarrassment is a luxury and that too can wait.