Imagine sitting in a decent restaurant. The waitress just brought you your chicken salad and you eagerly take a bite.  People are seated all around you, chatting away. You catch a glimpse of a very cute man who is smiling at you. You smile back. The man quickly turns away in almost a ghastly manner.

You are shocked. Rapidly, you turn to your best friend seated next to you and ask if anything is on your face? Your best friend replies with a no. Relieved and still confused, you try to forget what just occurred. Until your friend continues her sentence: “No, but you have lettuce intertwined in your braces.”

In horror, you rush to the bathroom and try to excavate your mouth for every piece of the dreaded salad that you apparently didn’t fully consume. This scenario is utterly realistic for most people with braces. I can attest to this. I, Sabrina Yassem, have braces and I have in every excruciating detail experienced the above scenario. No, it was not made up; I actually went through that awkward and very embarrassing situation. Believe me when I say that I have a lot of stories like the above, and I’ve only had my mouth in orthodontic jail for four months. Four months out of twenty-four! I have basically one and a half years left, and I can only imagine the stories I’ll have by then.

When it’s all said and done, I’ll probably laugh about this one day. Heck, I even laugh about it now. You should always laugh about things now. Take it with a grain of salt. I may be a metal mouth so to speak, but it’s not like braces are the most embarrassing thing about me.

Once while I was at the mall, I walked past a clothing store and in their window sat these really cute boots. As I’m walking and clearly infatuated with these shoes, I run straight into the store’s security censors. There is no way you can play it cool after that. After not only picking myself up off the ground, I had to also pick up the last shred of my dignity and laugh at the total blunder that just happened. So while braces may take some getting used to, they’re hardly something to fret about (despite some secondhand embarrassment).