The Itch You Can’t Scratch

Do they make Vagisil for this?

Today the clerk in the fancy deli next door asked me how I was, and I said, 'I have deep longings that will never be satisfied.’

-Mary Gaitskill’s Turgor in “Because They Wanted To”

Have you ever had the feeling that Everything in My Life Must Change...Now? I think that I’ve woken up plagued by some version of this Itch since I was a kid, long before Instagram existed to put us all in a state of perpetual dissatisfaction. Some days, The Itch is subtle, something that I can slap lotion on and ignore. But other times, it feels like day three of a yeast infection — unbearable and unable to be scratched. 

The Itch almost never comes during tragedy — a death, a breakup, a trauma. Those moments are clarifying. When you are trying to survive, your mind is incapable of wandering any further into the future than tomorrow. You become intensely focused on the present.

The Itch instead creeps up when life seems to be going Just Fine. It starts at 6 a.m. when my cat paws at my face, and I wish that I would remember to order the damn automatic feeder. It intensifies when I’m scrolling through my inbox and receive a relatively benign work request that makes me scream out loud. It worsens when I see a Tweet from a girl five years younger than me announcing (*~ some personal news ~*) that she has secured her first book deal. And by 8 p.m., when I’m on a date with a Perfectly Nice Guy who is telling me about what it’s like to teach tenth grade history, I want to crawl out of my fucking burning skin. 

I decide that the only cure for The Itch is a new career, city, friends, partner. But I almost never follow through. The Bookmarks tab on my Macbook reads like a graveyard of Lives I Could Have Lived — dozens of graduate programs and jobs never applied to, itineraries for countries never visited, rules for writing contests never entered, emails to exes never sent. 

I turn instead to small, impulsive acts of anarchy — indulging in tequila, tacos, sex, screaming matches — all in some futile attempt to scratch The Itch and silence the voice in my head, the one shrieking, “Is this all there is?”

This newsletter is my newest, less erratic attempt at relieving my symptoms, since writing has always been my method for organizing my racing thoughts. When I’m focused on putting one word in front of another, there’s no space in my brain for What If or Now What. The black sentences filling up the white page in their geometric paragraphs fill me with a rush of immediate, unrivaled satisfaction. (Sure, sex is great, but have you ever fired off 1,000 words before sunrise?) 

So, here’s this curmudgeon’s little piece of parting wisdom on this gloomy November morning: If you’re feeling The Itch, you don’t have to change Everything today. Just do one thing that feels good, something you didn’t do yesterday. Write that first sentence and the rest will follow. That’s what I’m going to try to do, week by week. I hope that you’ll join me.

Xo,

Lauren 

Halloween, 2017. I went as “A Millennial.”