Enjoy the Itch
My birthday is coming up, and I’ve been reflecting on something I wrote down on my birthday last year for trying to do the best creative work I could do in the coming 12 months and also for milestones I’d like to reach: make it hard enough to matter and fun enough to finish. It’s become a kind of litmus test for my creative work, my habits, even how I think about what makes life meaningful. The more I’ve sat with it, the more it starts to echo something from psychoanalysis that I never thought would overlap which is Lacan’s advice that you should love your symptom like you love yourself.
The symptom in psychoanalysis is the itch you can never quite stop scratching. It hurts but it also feels good. It drains you and compels you in equal measure. You see it in artists who swear they’ll never make another album after one nearly kills them, only to find themselves heading back into the studio again the next year. Or in students who suffer through a frantic all-nighter and promise to never repeat it, yet in that very moment also feel more alive than at any other time. Or in runners who stagger through the pain of a marathon swearing they’ll never run again and then find themselves signing up for the next one. It even shows up in relationships, the same quirks and frustrations that drive you mad are also part of what makes you love someone.
What the maxim asks of us is to stop treating these things as accidents and instead see them as the very stuff of life. To love your symptom is to embrace the restless drive that makes you commit to something that exhausts you, frustrates you, sometimes even feels like it will destroy you, and yet that you return to again and again.
Having this awareness helps me resist the trap of instant gratification. Because so much of the world today runs on dopamine on demand. You scroll and swipe and binge and it feels like you’re being rewarded but you end up feeling empty. I remember when I was a kid and my parents went away for the weekend. I thought, finally I can watch all the TV I want. But after flipping through the channels endlessly I realised I couldn’t actually decide what I wanted to watch. I ended up watching nothing, and it left me with that hollow feeling that comes when you’ve wasted time chasing easy options. The same thing happens now on Netflix. What is actually satisfying is to give yourself to something a little harder, whether that’s reading a novel or watching a film that forces you to engage with it or creating something yourself. Because it’s only by doing something that costs you effort that you also open up that broader horizon.
And here is the other thing. When you give yourself to those harder things you don’t just create meaning for yourself. You create the conditions for others to find their own meaning. When I watch a musician performing or walk through an exhibition of paintings or hear a writer take a risk, it’s not just that I admire them. It’s that I feel a spark to do something myself. Their symptom wakes up mine. Desire is contagious in that way.
But it comes with a warning too. Lacan said the one thing you must never do is betray your desire. That’s the trap. You start creating not because it is your symptom but because you want it to be successful. You begin second-guessing what people want from you. And then if you succeed you are cursed, because now you are trapped in repeating something that was never true to you. That is a much worse fate than struggling with your symptom.
So maybe the point isn’t to live as long as possible but to live as richly and as fully as possible. Not to create the perfect work or run the perfect race or love the perfect partner, but to stay inside the struggle, to feel most alive in the doing. There will never be a final moment of arrival. If there were, you would have no reason to start again. The itch would be gone. Better instead to love the itch, to love the symptom, to love the restless drive that is both your torment and your joy. That’s what I want to remind myself as another birthday comes around. To love the itch, to love the symptom, and to keep making it hard enough to matter and fun enough to finish.