Dentists have come a long way in trying to dispel the agony associated with their profession. But that’s resulted in one of the more curious sensations one can experience legally today: an overt absence of pain.
This isn’t comfort by any means. Rather, it is explicitly the feeling of one knowing they should be feeling pain, but not feeling it. As my teeth have decayed with age, the act of sitting, reclined, mouth open and playing host to a power tool, has become a yearly occurrence at least. But for all those excavations, I’ve felt nothing. My conscious mind knows that the grinding vibrations that are radiating through my skull should be accompanied by agonizing pain. Yet, other than the general discomfort of holding my mouth open while a relative stranger jams a drill here and there, the event is basically an inconvenience — a chunk of time that I have to lay motionless and watch something on Netflix that I can’t quite hear.
To be clear, as a middle-millennial, I’ve never experienced the agonizing dental procedures that my parents once did. But on a fundamental level, I can tell what’s happening. Part of me is being violently removed by a spinning chunk of metal. It is causing traumatic damage to a part of my body, however small. And yet, I feel little more than vibrations. It’s a combination of anticipation and omission, bracing for an impact that never arrives.
Mentally I’ve had something similar going on. Without going into too much detail here, I recently sealed away the “Baba Yaga,” an individual and set of memories that caused me a substantial amount of pain over the years. In doing so, I identified a negative tendency associated with those thoughts. And once identified it simply… went silent. The result is a similar feeling to a dental procedure. I should be hearing a persistent, sullen voice that attacks me at all hours, tears me down, does its best to drag me to its level. I should be hurting. But for now I simply… don’t.
It’ll come back someday, I’m sure. But the momentum I’ve gained in its absence is very promising. It offers some time to prepare so it doesn’t lay me so low again when the sedative wears off.