I’ve had braces twice in my life.

The first time, I was young and didn’t know better. The second time, it was because after the first round, I stopped wearing my retainer and my teeth slowly drifted back to where they came from. As if they were saying: “You can force me, but I will go home.”

Getting braces is more painful than people imagine. Not because of the teeth but because of the phase where you look worse before you look better.

It’s a very specific, self-inflicted kind of pressure. You know you’re improving, yet every day the mirror says: under construction

Appointments take forever. When it’s finally my turn, the orthodontist just looks for a few minutes. Every question I ask gets the same answer: “Normal.”

But nothing feels normal inside my head. I worry about permanent gum damage. I worry the rubber bands are pulling my teeth into strange geometries. I worry a natural curve will be flattened into two neat, parallel lines.

Each adjustment opens into an unknown stretch of time, with no visible end. At the core of it all is this: I have no control.

And when the body loses its sense of control, fear multiplies easily in the dark.

One day, a thought surfaced: Do humans actually need braces? We assume “straight equals beautiful,” but that’s just what happens after an aesthetic gets named and repeated.

Sharp canines belong to carnivores. Flat, orderly incisors suit herbivores. Messy, irregular teeth may simply be the legacy of omnivores.

Every shape tells a genetic story.

So when we “correct” all of it. Are we still ourselves? Is a medically perfected dental arch, stripped of all personality, really more beautiful than the original code? Or are we just reshaping our bodies to match a global template copied and pasted everywhere?

Cosmetic surgery standardizes faces. Braces standardize teeth. The world is slowly being edited into one clean, identical sample.

But the body we were born into wasn’t it a story? One with quirks, deviations, and character?

So when we spend money and pain to grind all of that away, isn’t there something quietly ironic about it?

Is this improvement or a subtle mockery of the soul’s original choice



—— XC Scribbles · 貳拾壹 XXI 🦷