Land of Lakes and Volcanoes

I got my braces yesterday.  So, the experience. First, you walk in and there are a lot of implements. Like, a lot.  All that for my face. It's a little nerve wracking. On the right on the tray you can see the strips of plastic with my braces attached. They prepare them ahead of time so that they can be attached en masse.  This mostly worked well for me. One of the braces on my molar didn't stay the first time, and then they ended up moving two of them, so they had to take them off and put them back on individually. I wish I had a picture of the remover because it looks like the thing you use to skin catfish except that they pry a bracket off your tooth and it makes a loud cracking sound. Not what you want to hear while you're laid out in a dental chair.  They put a large circular tarp in your mouth, and then something that looks like a transparent horseshoe with suction and a light that you bite on. I felt like a bit of a baby as the first half was honestly pretty scary. I

So, turns out that having teeth that are twice as long as usual takes some getting used to.  For about 3 days I couldn't bite anything without a lot of pain where my teeth would crash into each other. I still can't really bite things normally, but as long as I think about it, I can now bite soft things.  Anything hard a no-go. My overbite is still massive, but now the pressure on my front teeth is at a new angle, so there's all sorts of new pain and new sensitivity. Additionally, bite props are a pain, literally. It means that all the attempts that I make at chewing put all the force of contact on 2 molars on each side instead of all of them, so by the end of the day, those two molars are killing me.  Given what everyone says about when you first get your braces on, this seems like good prep. I've just figured it out and am almost eating normal things again, and tomorrow the braces go on! Also, when I am stressed, I do things to my hair. I'm a redder head now.

Warning: there are about to be a lot of pictures of my mouth.  It's kind of gross.  Feel free to ignore.

Six years ago, a man broke into my house in Nicaragua while I was sleeping and I woke up to feel his hand on me knee. I held my breath as I tried to convince myself that the presence I felt in the darkness wasn’t really there. There was a struggle, a hand over my face, and then he was gone. For months, the slightest sound at night would wake me up, and I found it hardest to sleep when I was home alone. The worst of it though, was that I just knew deep down that somehow it was my fault. I’m a feminist, have never shied away from the term. I hated slut shaming long before culture gave me a term for the feeling.   I knew that victim blaming is repugnant, but I became my own persecutor. Earlier that night, there was a fiesta, and my friend Norlan had walked me home, and I’d invited him inside for something to drink. We’d left the doors to my house open so no one would think anything was happening inside. I was trying to respect the cultural mores of Nicaragua, but maybe that had g