For some reason, the event that separates childhood and adulthood, for me, was getting my wisdom teeth removed. 

Odd, I know. Something more like going to college, or puberty or my first time trying alcohol should probably have been an experience that felt like crossing that particular boundary. 

But no. For reasons unknown even to me, the moment I remember most clearly, and the one that in retrospect marks the moment I became a (very young) adult was during Thanksgiving break my senior year of high school, waking up woozily from a very routine oral surgery. 

It had taken several pricks to find a good enough vein to put me under (habitually dehydrated), and I spent the entire car ride home trying my level best to talk my mother’s ear off through a layer of blood stained gauze. Auspicious beginnings! 

Like many transitions, this one is best viewed after the fact, and took a lot longer than you might think. My wisdom teeth had begun to poke through my gums years before, in high school, making their crooked way to the surface and prompting a small army of dentists, doctors, my parents and peripheral family to check on them every few months.  

The appointment finally came around amid a flurry of college applications, and my recovery (which involved having to regularly wash my own mouth wounds with the most medieval looking plastic contraption I’ve ever seen) dragged on amongst the holidays and high school classes. 

It was only later that I realized that my wisdom teeth removal was one of the final expected and unstressful adverse experiences I would have. It was uncomfortable, yes, and often gross, but it was usual and scheduled, and I was driven to and from appointments and my mother still knew all my medical details. 

I was given a neat package of supplies and painkillers and instructions on how to dose myself with them, and was kept in a blissfully woozy state for the next week as I ate tooth-achingly sweet vanilla ice cream from the carton. 

So where do the tannins come in? Great question. Tannins are a group of chemical compounds that create the bitter tastes we know well in wine, dark chocolate, tea and coffee.

They’re the kind of grown-up, sophisticated taste that my parents loved and I hated. The rest of my family eats 90% dark chocolate, drinks their coffee black and prefers no sugar in their tea. 

When I worked at Starbucks for a summer, the strongest thing I could stomach was a chai tea latte. I get my caffeine from a kind of soda so sweet they warn you about them in high school PSAs. I love candy bars, and ice cream, and things that taste so obliteratingly sugary there’s no chance of another flavor muscling its way through. 

A few months after my wisdom teeth exited my back molars, the global pandemic hit me like a sock in a washing machine. I took a year off college, lived in South Korea, got rejected from too many jobs to count, got roommates, got an apartment, got a summer job, lost a job, interviewed for jobs, got rejected again and experienced the horrors of O’Hare Airport at least twenty-four times.

Essentially, I started having to cope with and experience negative things, things that made me feel upset with myself, and frustrated, and anxious and occasionally guilty. They were also situations that the concerned army of parents and caregivers often didn’t have many answers for. You can’t really parent away an economic downturn or a flagging job market, after all. 

It goes without saying that I dealt with most of this badly, usually by sulking or ranting or avoiding it all. Like my childlike palette, I didn’t want anything to happen to me that wasn’t nice, and sweet, and rewarding. I wanted every experience to come with confetti and sprinkles, and if it didn’t, it felt like a failure. 

But sometime during my junior year of college, a switch flipped, and I started to actually like bitter things. Earl Grey tea, coffee and even dark chocolate. I started to understand what it meant not just to endure the bitterness, but to actually savor it. I realized that when you actually accept the flavor, instead of burying it, it opens up a world of complexity. It was like everything suddenly went from a flat drawing to one that was shaded in. 

Because that’s what bitterness can do, besides just shocking you and making you feel discomfort. It adds dimension to your life: Light and shadow have no meaning without the other. 

I realized I had been viewing losing my wisdom teeth as both a physical and emotional loss. I went in as a happy-go-lucky kid with mouth intact, and I came out bereft of four teeth — halfway to dentures. On the road to ruin. Practically disintegrating! 

My attachment and memory of the event was a cliched way of expressing my feeling that I had lost something precious; my innocence and my ironclad conviction that I was going to be okay and things were going to work out the way I wanted them to. 

But there’s another way of looking at it. I lost my sweet tooth that sunny November day, but I gained a new set of taste buds as well, a shiny new veneer on my old set of canines. I got my tannins in. 

I slowly gained the ability of looking at difficult experiences as more than just stumbling blocks, but genuinely valuable experiences. I gained an appreciation of the bittersweet nature of most things. 

The complexity of two-dimensional experiences beckons you to look closer, to examine the world with a more discerning eye. I paid more attention when I wasn’t just focused on how positive everything had to be. 

Sure, it took a while, but today I can drink coffee and tea (with some sugar, of course), and I’m working on not wincing when I sip red wine. Even getting rejected from a job or an opportunity has something valuable to offer; it makes acceptance not inevitable but precious. 

I don’t just get through my life, hoping to skip past the bitterness and regret. I savor them, like dark chocolate on the tongue. 

If you have a pressing problem you need advice on, or a response to this, email [email protected] with “Best Guess” in the subject line.

Mika Ellison is a Medill senior. She can be contacted at [email protected]. If you would like to respond publicly to this op-ed, send a Letter to the Editor to [email protected]. The views expressed in this piece do not necessarily reflect the views of all staff members of The Daily Northwestern.