Evolutionary Failure
I have bitten the inside of my lip 5 times in the past two days. Really bitten it. Four days ago i bit the side of my tongue so hard that I begged Adrienne to knock me out.
BIting your lip or tongue is horrible! Part of what makes it so bad is that it is always unexpected, you never set out to take a chunk out of your cheek. I think what makes it truly terrible is that it launches a fight-or-flight response left over from when being bitten was much more common and certainly a cause for alarm.
Your brain is screaming, “We are under attack!”, and your stress level is worsened by the inability to escape from your own mouth. The fight response just leads to more pain. I once fought back and launched a fight-or-flight death spiral that ended with me running down the hall screaming as I socked myself in the mouth repeatedly.
I shouldn’t be biting myself in the first place. Natural selection should have provided me with lips and a tongue that are capable of staying out of the way of my teeth (Or is it my underused canine teeth going feral and demanding flesh?). And, I think it is fair to ask, why do I REPEATEDLY bite myself?! Shouldn’t survival of the fittest have taken care of that whole ridiculous, “bite lip, lip swells into path of teeth, bite lip every-freaking-time you breathe” cycle of destruction?
I am an evolutionary failure.
I have a slightly different problem… When I’m nervous, I bite the inside of my lip until it starts to bleed.
Now, once this happens, I usually find that the hole that is left is somewhat ragged. I mean, how often is it that you can bite a hole in your mouth cleanly. It bugs me so much that I continue biting and tearing at this hole absent-mindedly until the result is a 3/4″ circle of meaty, raw cheek flesh.
The bad part (besides the searing pain) is that this condition makes it hard to eat, which makes me hungry, which usually causes me to absent mindedly chew at the inside of my mouth.
Just thought I’d share… now when’s lunch?
Mmmm. . . red meat. So hungry. . .
I’m guessing that Adrienne is too nice to actually hit you hard enough to knock you out. Because I am a humanitarian at heart, please call me when you need to be knocked out.
i bet you thought there was popcorn in your mouth!
I have a big gaping hole in my mouth. I was getting my wisdom teeth taken out by this weird dentist and he was having a hard time on #4 (in Canada we do all 4 at once and stick it out). The last one just wouldn’t give and as he worked on it the room got to about 500 degrees. I knew it was getting ugly when he traded out his pliers for scissors. the trade happened a couple of times. He finally planted his feet on my chest and bodied it out. This was eight years ago and to this day I have a fleshy hole that I’m obsessed with sticking my tongue into. Every so often food gets caught in there and I have to wash it out. Man life is so hard sometimes.
I don’t think that you are an evolutionary failure, but you might not be living up to your evolutionary potential.
Up to a few years ago, your body evolved into a tall, athletic, fully functioning organism oblivious to the threat of biting your cheek or lip. However, although I haven’t seen you in two years, I am guessing that Joshy may have “let himself go” a little. This means extra internal oral mass. Thus, through means that are in no way irreversible, you have temporarily devolved to the point where the accumulation of fatty tissue between your outer cheek and the lining of your mouth has reached a point at which it periodically forces your flesh to jam itself between your otherwise well-intending teeth.
The solution is: stop playing Reese’s human slide, get out of your IKEA lounge chair, and take Reese to a real park where he can use a real slide and you can run around a bit.
This “revolution” will soon help you forget that you even have teeth or a mouth.
I think the lips-in-the-way thing might have something to do with why canines’ lips seem to curl when they growl.
you have apparently developed what is known as a fat mouth. I have seen fat ankles, i’ve written essays about fat throats and I have run from fat fat hands (grotesquely disproportionately fat hands) but I have only heard rumors of the fat mouth. Your worst problem is that, according to the studies rumored to have been done on the subject, the fatty flesh in the mouth is the most densely fat tissue in the whole body. As a result the eating of one’s own fat mouth contributes to an increasingly fat mouth and makes it that much more dificult to avoid eating ones own cheek. To top it all off, you now have a taste for human flesh and will never be satisfied with less. I will pray for your soul. let me know how if it works.
I’m so glad I’m not alone. But you didn’t even touch on the very worst part. It’s that sinking feeling that settles in just after the pain subsides. You realize that in about 4 days you’re going to have a wicked canker that will last for 10 days and keep you from enjoying most of your favorite meals.
-Jed
Try chewing gum all the time. Makes it much worse.
Enjoy!
wow, i totally know what you are talkin about. i thoughti was the only one. i chew the fuck out out of the inside of my lower lip and upper lip. only on occassions though. recently, i have been doing it alot and it sucks. i chew so much that I get this big hole and it’s like the size of a quarter. the wierd thing is, at first, it hurts, but it feels good. i’ve been doing this for quite sometime and I wish I could stop it. and what sucks now is, that i have these lumps in my mouth (not stds though) and i chew on those and that makes it so much harder. the worst is like 4 days after when it’s healing and you brush your teeth or you eat salt…what do you guys do to stop?