Originally published by The Clifton Courier, October 6, 2021

I’ve recently welcomed an electric toothbrush into my life.

As someone who has a mouthful of fillings, I’ve been wanting an electric toothbrush for a really, really long time. 

In Grade 1, my teeth were so bad I had to go to the dental van outside of school hours instead of being able to skip in and out that government-subsidised mobile dentist like all the other squares in my class who used actual toothpaste when brushing their teeth. I think, at one point, I even had to go back for more fillings on a weekend. And, look, it wasn’t ideal, but those hours in the dentist chair enduring the pain and discomfort of filling after filling gave me the disassociation powers I now utilise to survive the horrific news cycle with some level of functionality (dealing with the awfulness of all that is Future Dannielle’s problem*! Besides, my inevitable breakdown will give me great fodder for the memoirs I’ll need to write** in order to support myself as an ethically-sourced-cotton-wearing “creative” with a vast collection of dessert wines).

But despite having earned my own income since Grade 9, I’ve never actually gone out and bought myself an electric toothbrush. 

Don’t ask me why. It’s not like I had any moral issues with electric toothbrushes. And they’ve progressively become cheaper and cheaper as the years have gone on.

Given the percentage of my teeth filled with amalgams and tooth-coloured composites***, paired with the stupid amount of cash I’ve dropped on novelty horse and swan items throughout my life, there is no logical reason I haven’t bought an electric toothbrush before now. And it’s particularly shocking to think that it was only when I was confronted with a half-price model in a flurry of impulse purchasing that I actually took the plunge. It shouldn’t require a state of emotional vulnerability and something costing less than a carton of beers to make me invest in my dental hygiene, but that’s what it took. 

So let’s not dwell on the past, because we are now in the electric era of my dental history. 

And now that I’m here, I’m not too sure about it. 

I mean, the general wisdom is that electric toothbrushes are much more powerful and effective than their acoustic counterparts. They spin and vibrate and sing out when you’ve been going for two minutes. Those are all great things, but I can’t help but feel the acoustic toothbrushes are more authentic, you know? Like, there’s very little work that has to be done on my part.

All I have to do is turn the toothbrush on and slowly run it over each tooth in a calm and steady action. There’s no scrubbing. There’s no up-and-down or side-to-side, just a limp surrender to the superiority of machinery.

And, again, I’m sure this is great for my teeth. They do seem to feel cleaner these days. I’m glad about that, especially because the last time I went to the dentist, she asked if I was a smoker. I had to explain to her that the staining was so bad on account of my tea drinking habit. I really want to impress her next time I get in the dentist chair and I feel like my electric toothbrush will help me win over this stranger.

But I also feel like it’s making me lazy.

It’s kind of like the way I feel about reversing cameras and dishwashers – they’re both great inventions that save a lot of time, effort and money spent at the panel beaters. 

But I’m wary of our reliance on them, like it’ll make us soft and useless and, I suppose, render our human abilities somewhat obsolete. 

I mean, the now-extremely-outdated-because-everybody’s-streaming-music-these-days CD player in my car doesn’t even work so suffice to say my car doesn’t have a reverse camera. And I think I’m a long way off having a house with an actual dishwasher in it****, so I’m safe on that front too. 

But now I’m an eclectic toothbrush person, I feel like it’s a slippery slope into oblivion. At least my teeth will nice, though. 

*Look, Present Dannielle is actually the Future Dannielle that Past Dannielle wrote about when she sat down to write this piece, and let me tell you that Present Dannielle is most unhappy about Past Dannielle’s decisions. She and the Medicare system are now paying for those decisions.

** Present Dannielle is hoping to all things holy that Past Dannielle’s optimism that our shared Future Dannielle be some kind of literary success was not just Past Dannielle’s delusions and was, in fact, some kind of premonition.

*** Yes, I had to do a lot of Googling to get the terminology right for this one.

**** But in case any dishwasher companies out there want to sponsor this post, I’m very, very open to whatever business proposals you have…