I have a bad tooth. I used to have more, but over the last decade I’ve worked to have them filled, pulled, etc. and now there’s just one last tooth giving me trouble. It has a cavity that goes almost to the root. I had it filled between jobs in 2019 by a dentist who gave me a choice – fill, root canal, extraction. I was warned then that the filling would be ‘temporary’ and only likely to last 6 months. Well, part of that filling has come out, and the back half of the tooth has cracked and is extremely wobbly, but 6 years later it’s still hanging in there.

If you ask me why I haven’t had it pulled (root canal is just a no bueno in my book), I would cite the reason the dentist gave me… that because this tooth is next to one that was extracted a few years ago, it would leave a two-tooth gap between my back molar and the next tooth, which could affect the structural integrity of that molar (unless I invest in some implants for several thousand a pop). I’ve also justified not having it pulled due to work responsibilities and important events I’m working on; I know from experience extractions put me out of commission for days. Lately the excuse has been that I just don’t have the money.

But the real reason is… I just don’t like change. I hang on to old shit, put up with adverse situations, deal with (read: ignore) ill health conditions and broken teeth, far longer than I need to. Even when I know removing those things from my life or removing myself from those situations would make my life infinitely better, I still hang on.

And if I had to play armchair psychologist, I would say some of this might stem from the fact that my life has always been transient. Even before I was kicked out of home at 17, my family relocated a lot. In the first 13 years of my life I had lived in at least 8 different places across two different countries. And a lot more after I left home; in the last twenty years alone I’ve lived in 20 different places, some for only weeks at a time. I’ve definitely fallen into the “no fixed address” category a few times. And very few of the places felt like ‘home’, felt like places I could set down my load and relax my guard for a bit.

When you don’t have any real sense of permanence in life, especially when that is tied with low income and borderline poverty, you can fall into a line of thinking like “as long as I’m breathing and have a place to lay my head at night, let’s not rock the boat.” When you’re on Struggle Street for any significant length of time (like your whole life), you just try to fly under the radar and get from one day to the next. Any change to your existence – good and bad – threatens that status quo. And you’ve learned that even the good stuff doesn’t last, so you don’t want to risk putting too many eggs in that basket anyway.

To give another example, I am drowning in my current location. I’ve lived here for four years, and while I have a good relationship with my landlord, there are also certain infringements upon my privacy and my property that I’ve had to put up with. I have neighbours that blare their music at nightclub volumes at ALL hours of the day, sometimes up to 3 or 4 am. I have neighbours that get into wild domestics, sometimes involving physical fighting in the street and the cops getting called. On top of that I only have only 2 or 3 friends left in the area that I see on a regular basis, if by regularly you mean once every couple of months.

I’ve kept justifying staying here because the rent is cheap as dirt even for the ghetto area I live in, and the cats have plenty of room to run around. But my mental health is suffering so much because of this isolation and disturbance of privacy and peace of mind. There’s another area of Sydney I am contemplating moving to, where I would have at least a dozen friends I would see regularly. Where I would have access to a few spiritual communities. Where I would be closer to vet care for my animals, closer to the city for commuting and socialising. Yes the rent out there is more expensive – well over double what I pay here. But assuming I could find a housemate, I could make it work. I just need to save for the move.

And yet I hesitate to do this Good Thing for myself. And I don’t know why. It’s as mad as not having my bad tooth pulled. I just need to learn how to prioritise WELLBEING over SURVIVAL, but I don’t know where to begin.