I Quit Chewing Gum

It’s costly. It’s unsightly. And my jaws are tired.

By

Jan. 20, 2020

Forget about “Drynuary,” which I broke on Jan. 2 with that insouciant leftover chardonnay in the door of the fridge. Or diets, long feminized and scorned, and now rebranded by annoying tech bros as “intermittent fasting.”

What I really want is to eschew the chew. To give up gum.

Yup, your harmless little post-meal breath freshener has been my tormentor for over a decade. It was around 2009 — stressed by a leadership change at my former job, two toddlers at home and probably the Great Recession — that I began my harmless-seeming pack-a-day afternoon habit: a substitute for the sugar forsworn on the advice of a reproductive endocrinologist.

Orbit, Sweet Mint, its packet pale green, like money, like the approximately $5,500, conservatively calculated, I’ve spent on gum since then. If I had invested in Netflix instead of little rubbery sticks, I could have paid for those toddlers’ college educations.

But the other occupant of my shared office had been laid off, and so in lonely luxury before the open-plan revolution yet to come, I would sit behind a closed door, the refuse from my spicy Chipotle lunch in the trash can, grinding away at two, three, four or more calming, cooling pieces as I processed piles of cub reporters’ copy until the violet hour.