ابتسم — لأن عدم ارتياحك يفسد مزاجي

𝚂𝚖𝚒𝚕𝚎 — 𝚋𝚎𝚌𝚊𝚞𝚜𝚎 𝚢𝚘𝚞𝚛 𝚍𝚒𝚜𝚌𝚘𝚖𝚏𝚘𝚛𝚝 𝚛𝚞𝚒𝚗𝚜 𝚖𝚢 𝚟𝚒𝚎𝚠.

While much of Europe appears locked in a perpetual cycle of outrage — debating how Israel could possibly remain a participant in the Eurovision Song Contest, and how Germany dares to stand behind a state widely accused of occupation and mass-scale violations — I find myself focused on something more operational, more immediate: my annual health audit.

Every December, almost by muscle memory, I steer myself towards the usual battery of tests. Bloodwork. Vitamin levels. The predictable winter check-up that signals closure for one year and readiness for the next. Traditionally, my routine has been streamlined: gynaecologist, the standard blood panel, and a quick confirmation that my body is still performing its baseline functions.

But this year operates on a different logic.

Stepping out of a narcissistic relationship changes the architecture of your priorities. Surviving sexual violence restructures not only the psyche but the body’s operating system — and, in my case, even the nervous system of my miniature schnauzer. So my annual check-up expanded. Strategically. Assertively. As if I were drafting a recovery roadmap rather than keeping an appointment calendar.

Dentist. Ophthalmologist. Dermatologist. Specialists I had previously filed under unnecessary suddenly became non-negotiable. Not because I had symptoms, but because the past six months have been a high-pressure stress event. Trauma leaves residues. They don’t politely disappear just because the calendar turns. And so here I am, while the internet debates geopolitics, turning inward — running a full maintenance cycle on a system that has carried more than it ever signed up for. So I booked the earliest available appointment at the beginning of December — with a woman dentist, naturally. At this stage of my life, I default to female clinicians. It’s not ideology; it’s operational risk management. I trust women with my body in ways I simply no longer extend to men. She examined my teeth with the calm precision of someone who has seen far too many stress casualties in her chair. We spoke briefly about the quiet violence stress can inflict on the mouth. She told me that what used to be a rare finding — flattened molars from night-time clenching — has now become the industry standard.

“Twenty years ago,” she said, “we’d call in the trainees when we saw a patient with severe grinding damage. Today we call them in when we see someone without it.”

She added that it is overwhelmingly women who present with the most severe patterns. Especially women in toxic relationships or those in physically demanding lines of work — the kind where you absorb tension in the jaw because you have nowhere else to put it. She confessed she no longer recommends bite guards. Too many of her female patients crack them within days. Instead, she now prescribes physiotherapy to retrain the jaw, to teach it that survival does not always have to involve clenching. She also noted — almost apologetically — that she often sees the back teeth in women simply giving way. Snapping. Breaking. Collapsing under the constant load of pressure. A mechanical by-product of emotional labour that no medical textbook ever bothered to quantify.

At some point, I asked a question I wasn’t sure one is supposed to ask a dentist:

whether she could tell if someone had recently had oral sex. She didn’t confirm it outright. But she implied enough. Sometimes, she said, the tissue changes, the micro-irritations, the pattern of redness — they can suggest certain activities. Not conclusively. Not diagnostically. But suggestively. And then she added something that hit harder than I expected:

that oral sex can be a far more dangerous transaction for women than most men will ever bother to understand. Many men, she said, aren’t even aware they are carriers of infections they can transmit during oral contact — silently, carelessly, confidently. (HPV, gonorrhoea, chlamydia, syphilis, herpes simplex virus.) It was a reminder that what men often treat as a harmless expectation — a recreational entitlement — can have very real, measurable health implications for the women on the receiving end. We drifted into a conversation about whitening, professional cleanings, and the eternal question of toothbrushes — the kind Instagram influencers swear by, the kind that cost the same as a return flight to London, the kind that promise a Hollywood smile you never asked for. I asked her whether there was anything she could genuinely recommend. Every second person online seems to own an Oral-B Pro-Whatever for a small fortune. I just wanted clarity. She smiled the kind of smile only a clinician with 15 years of realism can manage. “Honestly,” she said, “any toothbrush is a good toothbrush — as long as it’s actually used. But because you’re autistic, I’d lean towards a sonic brush. It still vibrates, you’ll still feel it, but the sensory shift will be easier for you than the aggressive rotation of most electric brushes.”

I thanked her, paid, walked out — and yet one thought continued circling.

Routine.

And how much it takes for some of us to build one. She had mentioned that part too — that daily habits around oral care are not instinctual. They are taught. Modelled. Reinforced. And for some children, they are simply never introduced at all. I grew up in an environment where dental care did not exist as a concept. My mother believed apples and parsley were superior to toothbrushes and toothpaste. She insisted yellow teeth were natural, inevitable, and nothing worth worrying about. I spent my early childhood chewing fruit and herbs while quietly forming a lifelong hatred for parsley. When I finally encountered a dentist for the first time — at school, during a routine screening — I was handed my first filling. The expectation that I should “take better care of my teeth” arrived before anyone had ever shown me how. It wasn’t until I was nearly eight, living in a children’s home, that an educator placed a toothbrush and a tube of toothpaste in my hands. She gave them to me casually, as if this were something every child had always had. I remember holding them like foreign objects, unsure how they worked, ashamed to ask. That is the thing we rarely talk about:

that oral hygiene is not simply a discipline, but a learned behaviour.

And if your parents never model it — not once — establishing it later becomes an uphill climb, riddled with gaps, guilt, and guesswork. I ran away from the children’s home at fifteen.

Not because I was “rebellious”, not because I hated rules — but because the institution insisted I should attend therapy sessions together with my mother, a woman whose violence had shaped my entire childhood. I refused. They labelled me “difficult”, “demoralised”, and decided I belonged in a facility for “troubled youth”.

The truth?

I have never struggled with authority.

I struggle with nonsense — with systems that punish instead of explaining, with adults who prefer discipline over communication. So I left. I lived on the streets, dropped out of school, and a healthy routine became almost impossible to maintain. Between overstimulation, hunger, and constant fear, brushing my teeth was a luxury — and anyone with ADHD and autism knows this contradiction intimately: one part of your brain needs routine to survive, the other part sabotages it the second life becomes overwhelming. During that time, I met plenty of older Polish men who allegedly wanted to “help”.

Help meant a night on their sofa.

Help meant “pocket money”.

Help meant that the sexual expectation came later — always wrapped in a performance of generosity. At first, there was never any mention of sex. Just a “good man over forty” offering a meal or a warm place to sleep.

But when the door closed, the tone shifted. I was shouted at, intimidated, sometimes hit, until I agreed to sex or oral sex. Sex they could frame as “responsible” because of condoms.

Oral sex, however, was where their entitlement showed its full arrogance.

They said — and I quote their words precisely — that a blowjob with a condom was “like licking a lollipop through paper”.

My boundaries were an inconvenience; their pleasure was a priority. (Side note: these are the same men who now campaign loudly against child marriage. One wonders why — perhaps because marrying a child would limit their access to the others.) Eventually, I moved in with my boyfriend — while the police pretended to “search” for me. I tried to build something resembling a normal relationship. It didn’t work. One could say I’ve been about as successful in relationships as Poland has been in combating antisemitism — which is to say, not at all. My health routines were replaced by constant fear of losing my teeth.

I ended up with yet another man who hit me regularly, humiliated me consistently, and reminded me daily that my body was not mine. At some point, I had nothing left to lose and became willing to fight him. If it cost my life, then so be it.

And yet — in spite of everything — I still have all my own teeth.

Partly because the obsession I developed around eighteen — regular medical checks, immediate appointments for even the smallest symptom — became a survival mechanism.

Partly because I eventually grasped the one truth no one teaches girls in Poland: your health will always be more important than a man’s temper.

And here’s the inconvenient data point that rarely shows up in public health campaigns: women are statistically more likely to develop dental issues such as cavities, enamel erosion, and gum problems — not because they are “careless”, but because anxiety disorders and eating disorders (far more prevalent among girls and women) directly impact oral health. Chronic stress alters saliva production. Vomiting destroys enamel. Irregular meals destabilise pH balance.

Trauma has dental consequences.

When you grow up without safety, your mouth becomes one of the first places where the damage shows. Even after leaving the children’s home and surviving the chaos of unstable men, trauma continued to mark my body — not just in memory, but in enamel, gums, and jaw tension. Chronic stress does more than fray nerves; it literally reshapes your mouth. Grinding, clenching, biting — these habits leave traces that even the best dental routines struggle to undo. And if you’re neurodivergent, like me, the struggle is compounded: my autistic need for structure conflicts with my ADHD’s inability to maintain repetitive tasks, making brushing and flossing feel overwhelming, almost impossible, especially under sensory overload from toothpaste textures or electric brushes.

Stress also strips the body of crucial nutrients. I learned this not in a textbook, but from conversations on Berlin’s streets with women surviving addiction, prostitution, and trauma. Many of them shared quietly how stress and substance use — discreet, almost invisible in women — eroded their health, especially dental health. Alcohol and drugs drain vitamin D, calcium, magnesium, B‑vitamins, zinc, leaving gums inflamed and enamel soft. These are the same nutrients dentists rarely ask about. Women often internalise blame, claiming “I’m too weak” when confronted with health consequences, not realising that subtle dependency accelerates decay and gum disease.

Vitamin and mineral deficiencies are common, yet poorly understood:

• Vitamin D: essential for calcium absorption, preventing soft teeth.

• Vitamin C: supports gum health, deficiency causes inflammation.

• Calcium & Phosphorus: build strong enamel, deficiency leads to fragility.

• Magnesium & Zinc: stabilise mineral metabolism, reduce inflammation.

• B‑vitamins (B2, B12, folate): maintain oral mucosa, prevent ulcers.

These deficiencies, paired with trauma and subtle addiction, create a perfect storm for women’s oral health. Add to that the pressure of surviving abusive relationships, the neurodivergent struggle with routine, and you understand why dental hygiene is rarely simple, even when intention is strong. From my own experience and from women I spoke to on Berlin streets, the picture is clear: trauma, stress, neurodivergence, and discreet substance use converge to make dental care a battlefield. But recognising it is the first act of reclamation — a conscious, defiant step toward preserving health and autonomy, tooth by tooth. I need to make one thing clear before we go any further. I can’t really speak about drugs in the first person, because I’ve never been dependent on anything like that, only alcohol — and even that was a conscious decision, not a physical addiction. When I was young, pretty and naïve, I had a good friend. We eventually broke up, but stayed friends. Everything was fine until the day he decided to rape me. I went to the police. A year later, there was a court case. The judge told me it was my fault I had been raped — because I was at the party and wore leggings. My life collapsed.

For a whole year, I drank daily. I completely neglected my health. It was a dark, consuming state — until I met a woman who inspired me to explore Judaism, attend synagogue, and start learning about its traditions. But that’s another story. During that time, my alcohol issues faded naturally, because I am the kind of person who can make conscious choices, without becoming dependent. Perhaps it’s because my ADHD doesn’t tolerate strict routines; independence requires daily rituals, for example, visiting the dealer every day, which I would have found absurd. I became increasingly immersed in Jewish culture and kosher food, and eventually moved out of Berlin to Brandenburg, because I realised Berlin wasn’t good for me. I met new people, and one of them was Brigitte. I found her fascinating: a vegan, attractive, healthy, skilled in cooking, and deeply feminine. The more I got to know her, the more I learned about medieval practices and edible plants growing around us. I also met Marco, who explained on a forest walk that roughly 80 percent of what grows naturally around us is actually edible. But it was through Brigitte that I really started learning about natural cosmetics, because she personally avoided all chemical products and even vaccines. That’s when I began exploring oral hygiene from a natural perspective.

𝚃𝚘𝚘𝚝𝚑𝚙𝚊𝚜𝚝𝚎, 𝚃𝚊𝚋𝚜 𝚊𝚗𝚍 𝚝𝚑𝚎 𝚂𝚎𝚊𝚛𝚌𝚑 𝚏𝚘𝚛 𝚊 𝚁𝚎𝚊𝚕 𝙲𝚕𝚎𝚊𝚗 𝚂𝚖𝚒𝚕𝚎

I have tried them all — the classic tubes, Sensodyne included, and the newer “natural” or “zero‑waste” toothpastes. For a while, Sensodyne gave me that bright, clinical white smile. It felt reliable. But after meeting Brigitte and getting drawn into a worldview that favoured earth over lab, I started to question whether “chemistry and whiteness” were really what I wanted in my mouth. Because let’s be honest: Vikings — at least in legend — weren’t exactly brushing with fluoride. They had clean, strong teeth. Not because of a paste, but because of discipline, diet, and respect for the body. That medieval‑style ideal appealed to me.

So I began to treat toothpaste like another ingredient in a sustainable lifestyle: the greener, the better. I started checking the tiny coloured stripes or bands on tooth‑paste tubes — the ones that many people ignore. My rule became: if there’s a green stripe, you’re probably dealing with mostly natural ingredients. But here’s the problem: I searched for proof — scientific, regulatory, anything — that those stripes carry real meaning. I found nothing reliable. As far as I can tell, those markings come from the manufacturing process — color‑code marks used to help the filling machines know where to cut or seal the tube. Not an indicator of ingredient content. Any belief that green = eco, blue = mint, black = clinical, is just that: a belief, not a fact.

That doesn’t mean I regret following my gut. Because as soon as I swapped the conventional paste for zero‑waste tabs, I discovered a few truths:

• The tabs don’t foam. None. Not a bubble in sight. Which felt weird at first — I was trained to associate foam with cleanliness.

• But they clean. Often deeper than pastes. No bloated chemical mint aftertaste, no toothpaste residue. Just clean, stripped-down mouth.

• They travel. Israel, Berlin, Brandenburg — the tabs survive TSA inspections, hand-luggage scans, suitcase chaos.

So today, I’m no longer chasing that “Sensodyne whiteness”. I’m chasing honest hygiene.

What remains today? I still use coconut oil instead of Listerine. Because, as we all know, Listerine shared the same fate as bubble wrap: created as a cleaner, marketed as a hygiene product. You can imagine my surprise when my flatmate, instead of cleaning his feet with it, rinsed his mouth. Back to the point. There’s a saying men often throw around: “Smile. You look much better when you smile.” In slow translation: “Smile, because I don’t want to deal with you as a person.”

Some of us can’t smile. Some, because of cultural norms — in Russia, for example, as a foreigner, smiling outdoors can make you look odd. Others, because of the colour of their teeth. Others, missing teeth. And then there’s the group of women who are afraid to smile, because men interpret it as agreement, as permission for whatever they intend. Here I am, returning to the starting point: after a narcissistic relationship, with relatively healthy teeth but still a jaw screaming for physiotherapy, I want to reclaim my oral health. Because what we often forget is that the greatest attack another can make on us is to distract us so completely that we neglect ourselves. The greatest harm we do to ourselves is allowing those attacks to succeed.

I was recently at that point. My narcissistic partner drained my strength to care for myself. I had to cancel dentist appointments because he saw them as a personal attack. My health was put at risk. And like every other Polish man I’ve ever met in my life, he decided to ignore my wellbeing. To dictate whether I could see a doctor, whether a condom would be used or not. My health, my autonomy, left entirely at his discretion. Now, a month into reclaiming myself, it’s clearer than ever: surviving a narcissist means the first thing you regain control over is your health. It should be the reflex, the immediate act after leaving. A health check following such a relationship isn’t optional; it’s critical. So let the world howl about Eurovision, or debate Israel’s policies. As a proud Kaschubin, I can tell you: occupation looks a little different from what Israel does. But hey — cry me the river. Your own life matters here, too. A thorough check-up before plotting your new year, before scribbling lists of goals, is far more practical than any political outrage. Because what plans can you achieve if your health is in shambles? If you’re constantly exhausted, plagued by migraines from teeth clenched in sleep without realising it? December has always been my medical closing month. This year, it’s also a month to ask myself: how long will I continue to tolerate narcissistic abuse? Men who ignore boundaries simply because a woman set them. And yes, this month, you’ll read a lot about my health checks and how I rebuilt my wellbeing after an abusive relationship. Why? Because it’s important to talk about. I am tired of staying silent, and if we don’t speak up, nothing around us will ever change.

So, If you have your own experiences with stress, teeth problems , or the way toxic relationships impact your health, feel free to share your thoughts in the comments. I will love to read your stories.

Let’s start a conversation that matters — because taking care of ourselves is not optional.

Frau Mutter Renate

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