Feeling hopeless about my teeth, could use some kind words

[housedatlast]

Hey yall. I was homeless or housing insecure for most of my adult life, and as a result, my dental hygiene has been lacking. I've recently made a lot of progress with finding a place to stay and generally improving my oral hygiene, but the price of dental care has remained prohibitive to me, and after a certain point I just accepted my teeth were doomed. It's been about eight years since I've been able to see a dentist. My teeth are yellow and ugly, they have white spots in places, and there's dark staining in between most of them from coffee and cola.

But next month, I finally have the opportunity to visit one of those free pop-up dental clinics in my area and I've been feeling so anxious and ashamed and am having trouble psyching myself up to go. I stay awake most nights agonizing about it.I feel like the dentist will be grossed out by my teeth, belittle me, and just end up having to pull most of them anyway. I have a few broken molars that will need to be extracted no matter what, I know, but my breaking point was tonight when I was brushing, I felt one of my front teeth chip near the gum line.



I'm scared of losing them all and having nothing - because the pop-up clinic only does simple fillings and extractions, not denture services or anything like that. I want to be better, I wish I'd taken better care of them. I'm so tired of never being able to smile in public.