Posture, expression, and self-image

Try the following experiment: pull your jaw back as far as you can and hold it there. If you have an inner voice, have some thoughts and see how they sound. Now push your jaw forward as far as it will go. Imagine going to the store or holding a conversation with your jaw in this position. If you’re anything like me, you’ll have a strong negative reaction to this image and a strong desire to keep your jaw in its natural position, physical discomfort aside. If not, the rest of this article probably won’t make much sense to you.

Your mind is constantly tracking body-position sensations and mapping them to a model of how you look from the outside. You know what you look like smiling, frowning, slouching and standing up straight. You know how much tooth surface you’re showing, what each corner of your mouth is doing, where your hands are, and exactly how much you’re raising each eyebrow and opening each eyelid. You use delicate motor control to choreograph all these features into expressions both subtle and simple, moment to moment, without conscious effort. There expressions are you.

That’s when things are going right. On the first of April, 2011, for me, things started going wrong. At around 2pm, I can only describe what happened as this: my teeth moved from a configuration that I recognised as me, in this body-position-to-self-image sense, to one that I didn’t. One that was more like the jaw-jutting-out experiment. I could no longer control my expression, or how my inner voice sounded, because the physical shape of my mouth no longer matched my model.

Of course, the exact positioning of your teeth is somewhat arbitrary and subject to external factors like losing teeth and not chewing enough; and your model can and does update over time. That’s what happened with me over the next twelve years: every few weeks my wisdom teeth would push my other teeth into a new configuration, I’d feel the wrongness for a while, and then my model would update.

It’s not all subjective though: some tooth configurations are better than others. Obviously, your teeth need to fit together reasonably well in order to chew food. Then there’s breathing: if your teeth don’t leave enough room in your mouth for your tongue to rest in an optimal position, it’ll slide back and cause sleep apnea at night or you’ll force it forward during the day and gradually tilt your front teeth outward.

I believe we can sense mouth function and dysfunction and their downstream effects in both ourselves and others. People with small, set-back jaws and crooked teeth look the way they do to us in part because of those things’ implications on having healthy offspring with that person. Similarly, and perhaps via this route, we can sense in ourselves when our body is not functioning optimally, even if we can’t always accurately perceive the root causes or even the basic nature of the dysfunction.

For a long time I, for example, just wanted to put my mouth back how it was before my wisdom teeth started emerging—a net reduction in mouth size. It took a consultation with a growth-focused orthodontist in March 2023 for me to finally realise that I needed to grow my mouth in both dimensions, as well as rotate my entire upper jaw counter-clockwise (front teeth upwards)—something it had never occurred to me was even possible.

Anyway, healthy function seems likely to be a large driving factor behind this perception—the one that tells you where you are on the axis between “all good” and “jaw jutting out involuntarily while shopping”. We want to be healthy, and we want to look healthy. But there still seems to be a particular flavour to the ways this can go wrong in the face—and the mouth specifically—as compared to other physical features. Being weak in the arms and looking weak in the arms may be mildly displeasing, but it doesn’t have that deeply and enragingly wrong quality that facial mismatches do.