I was recently gifted an electric toothbrush. I’ve never really understood their appeal, preferring to grind down the $1 ones from Duane Reade until they’re actually making your teeth worse instead of better, but since one fell into my lap serendipitously, I started using it.
It’s really fancy. It has a screen that counts how long you’ve been brushing for. It comes in many different languages with many different settings. You can (apparently) download a corresponding app that will tell you which areas of your mouth you are neglecting. I never got the app, but the threat of it means I move the toothbrush around in a more equitable, thorough way.
The screen timer is the thing I have beef with. Two minutes is the ultimate goal – I always thought that was a myth, but apparently not – and you get a little computerized face whose frowning expression turns happy the longer you use it. If you use it for under a minute, his face remains sad, like he’s disappointed in you. Like he expected better from you. If you hit 90 seconds, you get a little half-smile, a kind of encouraging ‘You’re so close! Just another 30 seconds!’. If you reach the nirvana of two minutes, the face beams at you from the screen, and if you go over two minutes, its eyes turn into stars.
The prospect of disappointing the electronically generated face on my toothbrush kept me brushing like a maniac for the first month I had it. Even on days when I was pretty sure I’d done all I could within 90 seconds, the sight of that half-smile made me pick it up again and go once more round my mouth, chasing the adrenaline rush of those starry eyes.
When I started having a very bad time – around two months ago, as you may recall – my brushing habits fell off the cliff with me. Most days I was averaging under a minute, and the electronic face stayed in a perpetual state of misery, like a tiny little mirror looking back at me. Its tacit disapproval made me feel worse, but I just couldn’t bring myself to keep going for a whole other sixty seconds. It seemed like such a waste of time. Everything during that period seemed like a waste of time, and the smallest tweaks in routine could send me down a hole – who cares if my teeth are clean anyway? I’m definitely going to die alone – so I would put the toothbrush back after only sixty seconds of usage and turn the light off on it.
My exterior life has always reflected the turbulence of the interior. Something as simple as a pile of clothes on a chair remaining where they are for days at a time implies a complete lack of interest in maintaining order and balance. I would move the pile of clothes back and forth between the chair and the bed every few hours, depending on which piece of furniture I needed, accumulating ten times over the amount of time it would have taken me to fold them and put them away. But that seemed, at the time, an insurmountable task, the one thing that would push me over the edge, that would sap the very last bit of energy I had, which I needed to save to go to work and to talk to people and to act like a human being when I was out in public. My outward appearance is the same. Far from indicating someone who has their shit together, if you catch me with a full face of makeup and carefully quaffed head of hair, it’s because I’m compensating for something else, doing the only thing I know to make myself feel better: looking hot. No make-up and naturally flat hair? Happy, and contented, and not caring what other people think about how I look.
It’s difficult enough to battle what is going on inside without having it manifest into the outside world too, where your entire environment becomes proof of your inability to function as an adult. A pile of dishes in the sink can lead to a self-loathing rant; dust on bookshelves a signal that you don’t deserve nice things. Of course, these can all be indicators too of a happy, busy life with no time to wash dishes or dust shelves – but you don’t notice them as much when they aren’t a product of your own apathy towards being alive.
I knew I had started to feel better once I started doing little things that I knew would improve my state of mind, where before I almost welcomed the chaos. It meant I could say: Look, look how sad I am. You need to take care of me because I’m so sad I can’t even fold my clothes or do my dishes or go grocery shopping or take out the recycling. But once I had recovered the will to at least seem like I was getting better, the performance of these tiny tasks became routine again.
The other day I managed 2:01 on the electric toothbrush. The starry-eyed man told me that things are looking up.
One good thing:
Our drug dealer neighbour is moving out and wants to throw me a leaving party. Officially staying inside and away from the windows until he’s gone.
One bad thing:
I watched Good Morning, Vietnam this week and it did not turn out to be a good substitute for watching Ken Burns’ Vietnam documentary. I have more questions now than I did before watching.