And there was a great gnashing of teeth.

And there was a great gnashing of teeth.
Around 2:30am on Monday morning, Erik shook me awake. "Julia, you're grinding your teeth." This left me in a freak-out-induced hour or so of sleeplessness. I finally woke up again at 7am, noticing that my teeth were grinding again when I woke up. A dismal future of chewy plastic dental appliances flashed before my eyes.

Later that day, I mentioned the early morning rude awakening to my friend John, and he insisted that nighttime teeth grinding is an undeniable sign of stress. I just sort of brushed it off. Or I was interrupted by Joel. I'm sure it was a combination of both. Yeah yeah, Julia is stressed out again and it's causing freaky physical manifestations, blah blah blah. When I'm stressed out, I usually deal with it psychosomatically more than on an purely emotional level. This wasn't really that surprising to me.

However, the more I thought about it, the more I realized I couldn't think of any particular teeth-grindingly source of stress. I was going over this with Erik last night, listing the steady baseline of work stress and social stress but nothing really huge. I told him it was a little odd that I'd choose to start grinding my teeth right now, when I could easily list times in the past where stress had totally trumped anything I'm dealing with this week/month/year. I was actually wondering if there was something huge on the horizon that I was interpreting on a subconscious level. And then I started thinking about the word "gnashing" which always cracks me up in church when they read the part about Judgement Day. Most people are afraid of the Book of Revelations, but I'm always slightly entertained by images of a group of crazy people prancing around and gnashing their teeth. I digress.

Then Erik sheepishly said, "Oh. You've done it before, though." Maybe he didn't really have a sheepish tone, but I thought he should have sounded sheepish and took some psuedojournalistic liberties.

So it turns out I'm a habitual teeth-grinder. Thanks, person-who-has-slept-next-to-me-every-single-night-for-the-last-four-years-and-two-weeks-but-never-brought-it-up-until-now.