Letting go (just a little bit)

The Invisalign saga continues. After several days of great fear of ripping the trays every time I tried to pry them from my teeth, I settled into the new world of having plastic trays in my mouth 21/7. I'm now on my third and final set of trays before I see my ortho again, and it's Christmas, which in my world means pajamas and lots of cookies.

So have I been good about keeping them in 21 hours a day? Well, not really. Whereas on Thanksgiving I skipped breakfast in order to buy myself an additional hour in the trays so that I could relax and enjoy a leisurely Thanksgiving lunch, this Saturday when I had friends over, I took the trays out and enjoyed myself. I've got three weeks on this set of trays before I get re-checked, so I figure I've got an extra week to be good.

And my teeth are most definitely moving, especially the lower middle ones, the reason I got the Invisaligns in the first place.

This whole thing has once again reminded me of what a control freak I am. Although I know that the longer I keep the trays in every day, the faster my teeth will move, I also know that if I'm bad for a couple of days here and again, it's not a crisis. I might delay the treatment a little bit, but I waited for 20 years to fix my teeth once they shifted after braces, so what does it really matter if it takes another month or two to finish my treatment?

I've made my life miserable on days when I really wanted to eat a snack before class and chose not to because I'd miss a few minutes in the trays. I'm one of those people who can sit in the dentist chair with a nail poking into my thigh and I can tolerate it for an hour or two simply by dealing with it. I have often thought that aside from the smelling really bad, I'd be a great Survivor player, because I have the patience to withstand a lot of discomfort before I crack. But this ability to sublimate my physical reality in order to make things simpler for other people and to make myself look better (yes, it's a kind of vanity, being the "best patient") creates a controlling monster in my psyche.

So this morning after yoga I went and got a cup of coffee, popped out the trays, and enjoyed it. And yes, I brushed my teeth AGAIN, which is fine, but that coffee sure was wprth it. Did I miss 30 minutes of treatment time? Yup. Did the world stop turning? Nope.

I'm still learning.