If I had just one piece of advice to give this world, it would be this: beware of dentists. The reason I’m in a position to dispense such advice with such imposing authority is my own relationship with my dentist – which lasted six years of my childhood. And in all those six years, he was treating me for just one problem. Just one.

The culprit, I was told, was my chin. I had a longish, slightly protruding chin, the reason for that being that the teeth of my lower jaw, flying in the face of the established norm, overlapped the teeth of the upper jaw. This was, for some incomprehensible reason, frightfully wrong and had to be fixed.

And so, the great experiment began. One of the dentist’s reasons for getting this fixed was so that my self esteem wouldn’t decline because of of my little barely noticeable abnormality. So his idea was to simply shift people’s attention away from my teeth to other cumbersome apparatuses and instruments that would be attached to me, some of which I’d have to wear even when going to school. Apparently, having people scream in terror whenever they looked at me was far better than having my lower teeth in front of my upper teeth.

As the painful years went on, the intricacy and the conspicuousness of these instruments only grew in scope and ambition. Things reached their nadir in the fourth year, when after making me wait for an hour, he called me in, and with a proud, self-congratulatory smile, presented to me his latest invention. “So, what do you think?” he asked.

I looked at the abomination, trying to figure out what exactly it was, and more importantly, just what something like that had to do with me. “What is it?” I asked.

“Why, it’s your new dental face-mask-slash-chin-cap!” he exclaimed, as he showed me how it worked, and helped me put it on. But that wasn’t the end of it, see, simply wearing it wouldn’t do anything. It was all the interconnected rubber-bands and springs that were subsequently fixed to it that made it work.

When I got home that day, my family just stared at me. I heard the shattering of a glass somewhere. Quickly, I ran to the bathroom and for the first time, I took a look in the mirror, and got very, very scared.

What I found myself staring at could best be described as a very young version of Dr. Hannibal Lecter, who had to wear that mask to protect the general public from his cannibalistic tendencies. Thereafter, looking in the mirror without the mask was no less frightening – after all, wouldn’t young Hannibal there then be unhindered in his quest to make a meal out of me?