A dent in multiple dimensions

A unique situation has led me to ponder a lot on what personality is, what your own idea of who you are is based on, and how flimsy and arbitrary some seemingly predetermined and deeply-rooted properties of a personality might be.

The basis of all this is that my dental arches (the way the teeth are arranged) changed shape in 2011, this changed the way my voice sounded even inside my head, the new voice wasn’t what I intended to sound like, I found that it was impossible to “think” in a way that made my internal monologue sound like the voice I’d recognised as mine throughout my life previously, and this instantly became a source of existential rage that has plagued me on and off ever since.

So one thing is your voice: a deep and seemingly fixed and inseparable part of “who you are”. When people think of you, they think of your voice.

CFD, the thing that ultimately caused my head not to develop in the right way and set the stage for the disruption that occurred in 2011, when my wisdom teeth started emerging into an already malformed jaw structure, has put a dent in my head.

It’s literally there — if you look at a photo of me you can see that the right (your left) side of my face is “dented in” because my skull has grown around a too-small maxilla (the main bone of the midface, and the upper jaw). This has caused it to distort and twist, and there’s a visible kidney bean-type shape to my head as you look at me head-on.

It’s also there metaphorically. The dent shapes my voice as it exits my mouth when I actually speak, applying a slight distortion to the way words are articulated. The knock-on effects of jaw and skull underdevelopment, which include chronic tension, combine with another anomaly, tongue tie, to apply a slight strain to my voice. I am tense and tired. That is a part of who I am, because it is part of my voice, but it is arguably not deeply rooted or fundamentally tied to “who I am” as a person. It is the result of a disease.

This dent in my voice also applies to the voice I hear inside my head when I think, because one influences the other. You might be able to think in Arnold Schwarzenegger’s voice for a sentence or two, or read a meme in the “Good news, everyone!” voice from Futurama, but your internal voice will inevitably default to using your brain’s model of how your voice actually works, which is heavily influenced both by your experience of hearing your voice and, I have found, by real-time sense data from your mouth.

Of course, a dent in the skull, when it’s at the front at least, will also have an effect on facial expressions, with similar implications to the voice effects. Similarly for posture, which is a big part of body language. (Posture is affected by CFD via compensation for a restricted upper airway.)

By putting a dent in my physical skull, CFD shapes my immediate health and wellbeing. By putting a dent in my voice, expressions, and posture, CFD shapes how I’m perceived, what my personality is. By the combination of these, CFD has put a dent in the whole trajectory of my life. I’m now running a campaign to raise awareness of CFD, and it’s becoming a major part of my identity.

One thing I’d like to make clear is how this “dent in personality” dimension develops and manifests. It’s not just other people who hear my strained voice, see my awkward gait, see the bags under my eyes, see the way my face twists and turns down into a sarcastic smirk when I try to show a genuine smile. I see these things as well. How much of a person’s idea of their own personality is informed not by the privileged access they have to their internal states and intentions, but by looking at the same things everyone else is looking at? The facial expressions, the voice, the posture, as they actually come out? I’d argue, maybe a lot.