the growing-up itch
an abstract prose-essay on the loneliness of growing up whilst trapped inside your own head, on the in-betweens in life, and the fear of knowing everything and yet nothing at all.
This is hard to admit, to any person, and even harder to admit to myself. Yet, I write it down, equal quiet and loud as I etch it into existence with fingers praying on plastic keys. Confessional on dark screen, like peeling my skin and stretching my ribs to bare myself to the God known only to laptops and leatherbound journals. Writing, prayer, confessional. Equal in desperation and faith.
This is what I tell myself.
An act of writing can feel so easy as breathing and yet so painful as bleeding, spilling from me in freefall, the catharsis of an exhale that leaves me aching, stripped bare and exposed within the vaulted walls of a church or a page – there is no difference.
I know the written word like many know God.
So, consider this an act of prayer.
Imagine this spoken best in the halls of a church or in the breathing walls of a confessional booth. Imagine this, too, with the struggled whisper of a secret and the desperation of a midnight phone call to an old friend.
In life, I have often been a lonely person. Perhaps the feeling isn’t simply loneliness – it’s loneliness coupled with lack of understanding, the feeling that no one has ever wanted to know the person hiding beneath my skin. A great deal of the time, I didn’t even want to know the person held within me, leaving me trapped inside myself, caged in bone prison, bound with sinew. I fled from self, sheltering from the sharp edges of self-perception, desperate to avoid understanding.
Even now, I am not yet sure if I know myself. Perhaps I am beginning to. I believe I may only ever know myself in momentary breaths, self-actualization that comes more like a punch than a stark awakening. It has no permanency. It’s a cold flush and it fades before my next heartbeat. There it goes — I’ve lost myself again.
**
I don’t ache over childhood because I believe that most children spend childhood lonely, occupied by the expanse of a person growing inside little bones, stretching to burst forth and be free; be known and be seen. Children cannot begin to know each other, despite best attempts. We are all too complex and self-occupied, barely growing roots yet constantly expanding. We are root systems of plants that have barely reached the surface — you will not know unless you dig.
Even as adults, to know is really an act of desperation, and to be known is a wish.
Nonetheless, I was a lonely child. Children know and love simply, but even as a child, I felt like an overfull glass, water droplets spilling over the rim. I did not feel the simple love of many children. I spent long days whispering into oak and mud, asking to be known by the earth if nothing else. Flesh could not know me, so I relied on the steady constant of terra firma.
(I learned, eventually, the earth is a better listener than a talker.)
I occupied my mind rather than my body, my head rather than my heart. My emotions have oft felt like roots stretching past me into the ground, nerve endings I cannot access. Feelings unbeknownst to me, until when I least expect them. When I can, the feelings come jumbled, in brief and terrifying abstracts, intense and furious.
I held on to what I could. Just as I do now, I relied intensely on the power of words, my one and only foothold, solid ground in earthquake territory. I remained lost in the mazes of my mind and I wrote stories, stories of people lost and found, hurt and healing, loved and longed for.
Above all, I craved belonging, so I wrote of belonging. I etched into the world what I did not yet see or feel.
(It is not a habit I have abandoned as an adult.)
**
I am cresting onto a wave of adulthood, still finding my footing, so I feel not yet equipped to speak of my young adulthood in a way that offers much grace or patience.
Thus, I will tell you what I know. I am not sure how much good it will do.
Every teenager bursts forth with emotions like a dam threatening to crack, but my vibrant, heaving, frantic emotions were little help when aided by the crises of young adulthood.
Like everyone else, I did the best I could. I fit into seams between walls and gaps between floorboards, echoing and seeking recognition. See me, know me, want me, hold me. Feeling known, even if known in pieces — known broken, known bruised — felt as good as the hands of the divine. I craved adoration, and if I couldn’t have it, then I would leave claw marks on the walls as proof that I was there at all.
Even if to be known was to be carved open and cast aside, I took it, hungry for proof I existed anywhere aside from within my own body.
I mistook the feeling of being known for the feeling of being loved. I let myself be taken apart, pieces of me stolen and warped by hungry hands. Consumption and hunger felt like desire, and I took anything I could get. To be something to someone, to anyone, was enough. I would take a stray glance with the same desperation that I’d take a punch to the jaw or a kiss on the cheek.
To be anything was enough. To be anyone was enough.
Above all, I wrote. I wrote voraciously, my mind a dam ever-bursting forth with words, threatening to crack under the pressure. My body could barely occupy it. I was convinced nothing I wrote meant anything, more a desperate form of begging to be allowed the grace to exist, as if the words on the page could give me the release the world held back. Even when I wasn’t writing things down, I wrote in the hollow halls of my mind, words echoing to vast and unoccupied space. It had nowhere to go, drifting inside me, so I carried it.
The page was a place to spill. Writing was prayer, punishment, penance for lives I tried to live and left behind. I was always trying to be someone else. It was the only way I felt I could exist in entirety, painting myself, in all my emptiness and fears, through words.
**
I think the truth is I have always been terrified nothing I do will ever matter.
I remember the first time I heard those words. Seven billion. My fourth-grade teacher held up a magazine with the words plastered across the cover, somehow both hopeful and damning. As a child, you cannot even begin to comprehend that number. How could you? A hundred people in your grade felt like the entirety of the world.
How could seven billion people really exist? I kept asking myself, where could they even live? Where did they all fit? There surely couldn’t be enough space for that many people.
It felt like drowning. A sea of people, surrounded me, all sides and all corners, like people could come raining from the sky.
Could I ever really exist? Had I ever really existed, at all?
How does a droplet of water in the ocean even begin to define itself, to be known, to be something? It is only one in an endless mass, a vast and expansive sea. I felt shapeless, formless. I was lost, and I would never be found.
In seven billion, where could I begin to matter?
I was a worried child. I am a worried adult. I ponder meaning, purpose, action. I take on tasks too big for my mind to comprehend, trying to swallow an understanding of a world daunting and boundless.
I want to create. I want to be something, do something, mean something. But if I am only a droplet, then where would I ever begin?
**
I make this promise, to put words to page. I make the promise that the act can be enough. Even if the words mean nothing, even if it is simply spilling, a mark of desperation by an eternally worried man. It can mean nothing and still be something. By putting words down, I am at least creating a mark of existence. A mark that these thoughts ever were, that I ever was.
I define myself, carve myself into the background of the world with hungry desperation to prove the meaning of my existence. To mark that there was a purpose behind putting the atoms that comprise me together before I am taken apart and returned to the universe again.
To exist simply for the sake of existence is not enough. I have to prove that I was here, that I was something, that in a sea of seven billion, that I was a molecule all my own.
Even if the words mean nothing, even if I am leaving my claw marks on useless walls, even if they are only desperate scratches, at least I have proven that these thoughts — these words — lived and breathed in me. And in that way, they meant something, and I meant something.
**
They call this feeling introspection, I think. It’s never been the right word. Thoughtful thought. Trapped in my own mind, broiling over with the weight of emotion and cognition, impossible to speak and too heavy to hold.
It should be a blessing. Most days, I drown under it.
For my whole life, it’s as if I’ve been trapped inside my mind. Even if I try to speak it out loud, to tell everyone, I remain always brimming full and sinking.
I witness the world around me, moving and existing, breathing like an organ itself, humans in unison. A singular heart beating.
It feels a punishment, to be burdened with self-awareness, so sharp it cuts me through. It’s exhausting.
In these recent months of endless preoccupation with the state of everything, I have struggled to come up with names for this time in my life. A period defined by terrible loneliness yet immeasurable pride. Beautiful, bright, sharp, terrifying existence. Painful, teeming with joy, motivated yet entirely exhausted. Entirely incomplete yet always searching.
It is not so simply wrapped up in the idea of young adulthood. Many of those around me are experiencing the same years in vastly different shades than I am, leaving me feeling as if I am living an entirely different life than everyone else.
These days, I’ve given the feeling another name, born from patient and careful study. The growing-up itch. It’s not an itch you can scratch, not a hunger you can sate. It looms and lingers, not punishing, fabulously gentle yet far from polite. It is an endless and imminent reminder of the work that is left to be done, the life that has yet to be lived. I am patient, but there is something humming electric beneath my skin, a version of me lying in wait that I am building a future for. An itch.
It’s a state of in-betweens, an impossibility in itself, and one I cannot begin to illuminate in easy terms.
I am an engineer of future self. I am both architect and gardener, churning raw earth into clay and encouraging blooms to sprout. The land on which my life will not come naturally, and it will not come with ease. I must plant seeds and construct the halls in which I will soon move through.
In my state of in-betweens, I practice introspection religiously. I am learning to know myself as some know faith. I have taken to the practice of self-worship in simple tasks. Breathing functions as prayer, each step a devotional hymn, each day lived a day sainted in the past for the structure I am continually building.
I crave to no longer be in-between. I am a bloom that seeks desperately to breach the earth and see the sun again — maybe even, for the first time.
I used to ache to be something. These days, I ache only to be.
I feel kinship with weeds, who pursue life before beauty, expansion before aesthetic. For weeds, beauty is a coincidence. If I am beautiful, it will be the product of my existence, a result rather than a foundation. A given, rather than a necessity.
The growing up itch is a state of in-betweens, a state of impatience and of insatiable hunger. The growing up itch looks forward into future and witnesses joy, but it does not know yet how to arrive there.
I am happy now, but the architect can only be so happy with an incomplete cathedral. My cells buzz and push for a path forward.
My breath speaks in in-betweens and my body lacks understanding. I am myself only as I know myself today, but I realize that this version of me is not yet whole. I am undermined by the simple fact of stasis.
It is not enough.
The growing-up itch is, in pure essence, melancholic. Grey areas so often are, lacking answers, leaving a bittersweet taste beneath my tongue. I am not often sad, not anymore. I feel as defined as a drawing half-shaded, a painting half complete. Beautiful but not finished. I have pride in how far I have come, but I am not yet done.
I know my parts, my pieces. I am filling in the gaps.
But as I begin to fill the gaps, empty space seems to spawn more empty space. More and more, I find parts unfulfilled. But I am not empty. I am as whole as the moment allows. A house under construction is still a house, no matter how complete. I tell myself this again and again, a mantra or prayer, a promise or a wish.
I am whole with myself, filled up and brimming. I am hungry and starving and well-fed. I watch sunsets from the overlook of the main road through my little town and I wonder, I think, I think and I wonder. I contemplate the future. The growing up itch vibrates inside me but I force myself to be still. I feel fit to burst. I find myself crying. I am always crying.
In these days, I begin to see the pieces I am missing, but I have no intention of filling in the gaps with the artificial. I tried for so long to make myself whole with false gods and occupy my heart with love that left structural damage. These days, there is no echoing, no pretending. I crave only the literal and the real.
The house I am building will come in time.
**
To tell you the truth, to ache would be simpler. To hurt would allow suffering. Hurt is simple. Hurt would warrant fits and screaming and the holy catharsis of tears. I don’t find suffering in these days occupied by long in-betweens. It is simply stasis. It just is.
I am overwhelmed by sheer breadth of emotion but there are little words to describe them. Just as my childhood self, my emotions have never come labeled in neat, ordered little boxes. I can begin to comprehend myself but I always end up losing the thread all over again. I don’t feel in ways so simple, leaning instead towards confusing concoctions of emotions that can be solved only in putting words to page in a desperate attempt for self-actualization. Even still, I’m grasping at straws.
I have begun to accept that I can know everything and yet know nothing at all. To sate the itch, this is what I believe. While I can begin to splice and pick it apart, examine the roots that create the feeling, by breaking it apart I lose the meaning. I end up right back where I started. The meaning is as circular and abstract as it ever was. I am left with all beginnings and no endings, and a brain worked into overdrive in attempting to understand.
I was an emotional child. I am an emotional adult. Sometimes, I tell myself, this is a product of feeling emotions differently, or more, than other people. Yet, I’m sure I’m not the only one who feels this way. My whole life, I have been sure I am not the only person who feels this way. It is an optimistic promise of a future known.
Seven billion, after all. The world is too big for no one else to understand.
But really, what am I to do with that? Am I simply to live with an understanding that I am alone now, and I might be alone for time indefinite? And despite that, am I to continue to have an ever-present, frustratingly optimistic hope that there is someone out there who feels the same?
So I write.
That’s really all it ever comes down to. That’s always where it returns, always where the road leads. Any question, any hurt, there is only one ending to it all. I find all answers, all solutions, all secrets, in writing.
It is a Bible I can write myself. Holy texts that come from my own hands and my own heart. I suppose in that way, God is both in myself and in the page.
I am guided ever-constant by my North Star. Yet, my North Star expects me to find the answers, to give them to myself. I cannot find the answers out there in the world. I cannot solve these problems with the help of others. No one and nothing can give me the satisfaction I seek more than the satisfaction I receive from putting thought to page, in all its’ impossibly impenetrable glory. Because that’s all it is, abstraction traced and transformed. I take it all - the impossibilities, the frustrations, the madness, the loneliness, and I turn it into something, something that I hope matters. Writing is a prayer that I can take the futilities of life and turn them into something legible, but more than that — something meaningful.
I draft and compose confessionals in the hope that anyone speaks the language. For most of my life, I can hardly fathom the idea of exposing the written word to the world. Not in pure, raw form. It is best spoken to the earth alone. It is hard enough, to facilitate the birth between mind and page. To release it to the world, to let them see and hear me, is daunting. I — like every other person who has ever created anything in the history of time — fear the sour rejection of misunderstanding.
But yet, I write. I write and I hope for understanding.
And in the meantime, I build.
I build, and I release myself in writing, and I wonder if it might ever be read by anyone who feels the same. I wonder if anyone else feels the growing up itch, the way it thrums under your skin like a second heart or an electric wire.
Writing is not so easy a religion to share. Writing is an autopsy on national broadcast television.
I carve my heart out and I hope someone else might look back and see something familiar in the bloodstains.
reading this made me cry because of how hard it hit. beautifully written. thank you so much for sharing
Those words felt like a train just hit me and like I've been wrapped in a blanket at the same time. Those are just the words, someone had in their mind. Those are just the words, right?.. "To be anything was enough. To be anyone was enough."... I thought i could never find the right feeling, yet here it is, written on the page I've found a link to on the tumblr.