what patients told me in the chair

hey, it's tiff.

for fifteen years i rebuilt people's mouths for a living. crowns, bridges, full reconstructions. i owned my practice for six of those years, which meant the same patients, the same chair, year after year.

and here's what nobody prepared me for. people told me things in that chair. real things. things they had never said to another human being. not because i asked. it happened over and over, for fifteen years, in a room built for teeth.

i want to tell you why i think that happened.

it wasn't me. it was the setup. i wasn't there to fix what they told me. i was there to fix the tooth. whatever they said in that chair was not going to become a treatment plan, or a follow-up question, or a worried phone call. they could set it down in front of another human and nothing would happen to it, or to them. no fix attached. no file opened.

that's when i started learning something it took me years to name. people don't stay silent because they don't want to speak. they stay silent because every place they could speak comes with a response they'd have to manage afterward. the advice. the concern. the changed way someone looks at you.

the diary is that chair, rebuilt. a place designed so that nothing happens after you say it. no name, no account, no reply to brace for. you write the thing down, a stranger whose brain works like yours reads it, and you are, finally, witnessed. that turned out to be the whole point. not the fix. the witness.

if there's something you've said to no one, it fits here: adhddiaryproject.com/write

🖤 tiff