Meanwhile… 022
Sometimes when an idea gels in my head it begins with a simple phrase, or an image, sometimes a combination of both. This started with the simple idea of a dentist asking the simple and obvious (almost childlike) question of “What’s in the mouth?” and I knew as soon as that scenario formed that I didn’t want the answer to simply be “teeth”, unless it was the teeth stating that themselves, lol
The idea very quickly morphed into the concept of a dentist pulling a “truth” out of their patient’s mouth, and the reason for this came to me just as quickly. While I’ve injected some humour into the exchange between the dentist and patient, there’s a deeper subtext to my reasoning behind the entire narrative.
My life hasn’t been an easy one. It hasn’t been the hardest, I’d never lay claim to such a thing – there are others far more deserving of having the stories of their hardship heard, but I can say for myself that my own life hasn’t been easy. I say this with some hindsight, what with knowing much better now the mechanics of who I am and how that led me down certain paths through my life.
One of those paths was a very crooked and broken one in my late teens and entering into my twenties. I was 19, I had terrible teeth, and I’d recently been misdiagnosed as being Schizophrenic – a misdiagnosis that the mismedication of for almost two years only compounded what was now clearly depression, anxiety and my attempts to navigate the two as an undiagnosed Autistic.
At the age of 23 my teeth were at the point of being in such poor condition that I had to have all but three of my upper teeth extracted, with those three kept to help keep an upper denture plate in place.
At the time, still depressed, still suffering anxiety attacks and still not knowing how to define or place them, I remember thinking that it would be nice if the source of such angst resided solely in those teeth – an antiquated, simple assumption that would have sat neatly (albeit ineffectually) with outdated medicine when it was the custom to attribute any misunderstood malady to whatever could easily be removed or hacked away at.
My teeth were removed and nothing changed. I never truly expected that things would, but at the least I did think that the cosmetic change would perhaps serve in some way to make me less… sad. It didn’t.
What became apparent to me as an awkward, depressed adult who’d hoped there’d be an easy way to shake off being an awkward, depressed teen was that awkward and depressed were perhaps just part of who I was and always would be.
So, anyways, I think there are two things that can be taken away from this instalment of Meanwhile…
The first thing is that this comic series is clearly steering towards being a visual journal of me trying to understand myself as much as being an art project for the sake of making art for the sake of keeping busy, which is what it began as when I first put stylus to screen and drew a child drawing, only to then find that the child was drawing an eye.
The second thing is that dentistry is stupidly fucking expensive and it shouldn’t be.
Nothing in healthcare should be. But that’s a rant for another day.