"Your canines are flat," the dentist told me, drawing a straight line with his finger in the air. He pushed the backlit mirror in front of me, and I leaned forward, skeptically tracing my finger along the blunt edge. It felt like the tips had been cut artfully away with an X-Acto knife. He wasn't pulling my leg; my teeth were flat.

I didn't talk much as he began to list the causes and their solutions. He told me that most teeth grinders, especially women, grind their teeth even when they're awake and explained that the reaction was so habitual that most grinders probably wouldn’t notice unless it was pointed out. With a pair of false teeth, he demonstrated just how out of line my jaw had been moving to create my teeth's current shape. I would need a mouthguard if I wanted to prevent nerve damage. Gently, he asked if I was a nervous person, and I laughed (nervously) back at him.

I knew that I suffered from bruxism (the technical term for teeth grinding), all tied up with my laundry list of sleep and anxiety issues. Even when I was a kiddo, my mom says the noise from me grinding my teeth would tumble into the hallway like someone was operating a buzz saw. Like most grinders, I'm at my worst when I'm upset: It's bad when I'm nervous, but it’s even worse when I'm angry. And that’s what’s really at the heart of all this — anger.

In my day-to-day life, I think you’d be hard-pressed to find someone who uses that word to describe me. More often, I get “nice,” a word that I want to cross out even as it sits in this sentence. Sure, we can all be bigger than the sum of one adjective, but nice just seems wrong: Nice girls don’t ignore their friends’ texts or chain-smoke on the balcony at parties to escape taxing conversations. They don’t argue with people on Facebook, and nice girls definitely don’t grind their teeth behind forced smiles so much that they flatten their canines.

For me, anger has always come in and out, like a radio station on a far-off highway. There are times when it weighs on me so heavily that I cut off all of my hair or relentlessly follow an outburst until I’m blue in the face, but mostly, I am nice. People compliment my ability to mediate — I talk to others calmly and with good humour, even when I want to shake them. I get little presents for people, and I send them messages to let them know when I’m thinking of them.

But between dentist visits, the anger situation had escalated from “keep an eye out” to “get in the bunker.” I felt duped. The betrayal was twofold: First, that my body was (very rudely) turning against me. Second, that it took a guy shining a light in my mouth for me to notice the damage that had been done. When had I stopped pay attention to my body so thoroughly that I had missed that?

Instead of buying the expensive custom-made mouthguard from the dentist, I opted for something more in the budget: a set of two mouldable, plastic mouthguards from Amazon for less than $20. Each one comes in a little blue tray that you soak along with the guard in hot water, and then bite into so it shapes to your mouth. I did it three times, just to make sure, and then sent my husband a Snapchat of me smiling eerily with one slid in. It felt like a joke, but when I took out my mouthguard the next morning, it was marked with deep divots.