The Itch
Somebody sends you a link.
No message. Just the link.
Or worse, a message that says, “Did you see this?”
You didn’t.
You do now.
You read it standing in the kitchen. Your name is in it. Your name is in a sentence you would never have written, next to a word you would never have picked.
You read it again.
The second time, you are not reading. You are counting. How many things are wrong. Which one is the worst. Who else has already seen it.
You close it.
You open it again.
By the third read, the reply has started writing itself.
Not on paper yet. In your head. In the shower. At the red light. You are explaining. Calmly, clearly, with dates. You are so reasonable in this version. Anyone who heard it would understand.
So you open your notes and get it down before you lose it.
It’s long.
You cut it.
It’s still long.
You add one thing back, because without that one thing they’ll miss the point.
It is 11:40 at night.
You send it.
And for about four minutes, you feel better than you have all day.
Then the reply comes.
Not from the person you wrote to. From someone copied on it. Or someone who saw the post. Or someone who read your answer and found the one sentence in it that could be taken the wrong way.
They took it the wrong way.
Now you have to answer that.
So you do.
By Thursday there are ten conversations where on Monday there was one. Most of them have your words in them. Words that did not exist until you decided to fix this.
The original thing was a paragraph.
What you have now is a record.
You know what an itch is like.
It isn’t pain. Pain you could deal with. An itch is smaller than that and louder. It pulls at you every few seconds until you give it something.
So you give it something.
You scratch.
And it is good. No point pretending otherwise. The relief is real. Your whole body agrees it was the right call.
A minute later it’s back.
You scratch again. Harder, because the first one didn’t hold.
And again.
You don’t notice the skin go. You notice later, when your fingers come away wet.
Now there’s something open there. Something that takes in whatever touches it.
The itch was never going to hurt you.
The hand did.
Go back to 11:40.
What were you writing to?
Not the article. You had the article memorized by then.
You were writing to the client who might search your name next week. The friend who read it and hasn’t called. The stranger who believes it and will never hear otherwise. The version of next year where this is the first thing that comes up.
None of those people had done anything yet.
None of those things had happened.
You were answering a future. And the future does not read replies.
That is what fear does. It takes something that might happen and hands it to you as something that is happening, and then it tells you the only thing standing between you and it is what you do in the next hour.
So you do something in the next hour.
It doesn’t stop with the reply.
You search your name. In a private window, so the search doesn’t count. As if that matters.
You go back to the comments. There were fourteen this morning. There are nineteen. You read the five new ones. Then you read all nineteen, in case you missed a tone in the first fourteen.
You tell yourself you’re just keeping an eye on it.
The next morning you check it before you check anything else.
Nobody is making you.
Somewhere in there, it stopped being a thing that happened to you.
It became a thing you do.
Read it once.
All the way through. Honestly.
Then ask one question. Not how do I make this go away. The other one.
Does this actually require something from me?
Sometimes it does. There is a fact that has to be corrected where the record lives. There is a line that crossed into something a lawyer needs to see. Then you do that. Once. Cleanly. In the place it belongs.
And you don’t send the extra paragraph.
Most of the time, the answer is no.
No is hard. No gives your hands nothing to do. No leaves the itch sitting there, loud, while everything in you says a little scratching would be fine.
You leave it alone anyway.
Not because you agree with it.
Not because you’re afraid to answer.
Because you can tell the difference between a problem and the urge to react to the problem, and only one of them was ever yours to solve.
The work you were doing last Tuesday is still there.
The call you were supposed to return.
The thing you were building before any of this.
The people who never read the article and never will, who are waiting on you for things that have nothing to do with it.
That’s where the day goes.
Not to the comments.
The controversy gets to be a thing that happened.
It doesn’t get to be the thing you’re doing.
You can’t control what got written.
You can’t control who read it, or what they decided.
You can control whether there’s more of it tomorrow because of you.
The scratch feels better right now.
You’re not trying to feel better right now.
You’re trying to keep it from getting infected.
See what is actually happening.
Do what actually needs to be done.
Then keep moving.