Some Things Are Just Itchy

On self-sabotage, illness, and the urge to explain it away.

In the summer, my Mom handed me a copy of her latest must-read book.

She presented it after I chipped my front tooth on a glass and then, on the way to the dentist, knocked another tooth on my car trunk—a calamity of calcium.

At the appointment, the dentist said that if my tooth didn’t permanently brown from bruising, I’d need braces or veneers to straighten my bite.

At this suggestion, I replied, “There’s no point. I’m not on TV…right now”.

I, a 35-year-old who’s never made a television debut, included the words right now.

To the dentist, this likely indicated that I’m between acting gigs — or more broadly, that I think I’m one carefully hashtagged Reel away from getting cast in Law & Order: SVU.

All to say, after a series of shutdowns, I was vulnerable, scattered, and searching for enlightened marching orders.

The book had a dated self-help aesthetic. The cover leaned on primary colours, oversized font, and featured a goldfish jumping from its bowl.

The name of the book was (and is) completely forgettable.

The Tipping Point? No, that’s Malcolm Gladwell.

Unstuck yourself? Too edgy.

Gaylord’s if You’re Sick it’s Your Fault? Close.

As it turns out, the book is actually called “The Big Leap” by Gay Hendricks. Gaylord’s thesis is that we, as humans, sabotage our next “big leap”.

In other words, we are comfortable with our status quo and want to avoid stretching outside of it. As such, we unknowingly invite chaos, illness, and all types of self-destruction into our lives to cockblock greater success.

This could mean slamming your head on your trunk so that you’re concussed, haggard and unable to focus for the next week.

It could mean getting into an argument with your partner on vacation so that you can’t relax and connect.

Or, if this were reality TV, it could mean behaving so atrociously that the network has to “part ways”, causing you to lose brand deals with Fit, Fab, Fun.

However, where I get lost is when Gaylord Hendricks asserts that once he recognized his own undermining, he was able to avoid illness and injury.

Through conscious unblocking, he claims to be rid of most suffering. This is a claim that airs on the fanciful, edging towards gurudome.

Plus, my hackles flare when my lack of immunity from the flu (and my own bullshit) is called into question.

At the same time, this hokey stance has burrowed within. I’ve replayed countless interceptions that have excused me from forging ahead.

As I blow the remaining green snot from my Christmas cold, I wonder, has self-sabotage caused mucus mutiny?

Could phlegm have been avoided if I’d successfully “unstuck myself”?

Is illness or a brown tooth a preventable personal failure?

Contemplating derailments through the lens of agency versus randomness is torturous. As if we need more reasons to blame ourselves. But reframed as an inquiry into the power we have over our luck, good and bad, it feels lighter and harder to dismiss.

Closing out the year, “Theory de Gaylord” was front of mind. 2025 ended with a Grade A, top-tier energy suck of horrors that prevented me from doing much of anything.

Enter, center stage: the rash. Or bug bites. Or hives.

Starting in early November, I awoke to a constellation of red, itchy marks on my forearm. A few days later, red swells appeared on my ankle. And then my back and chest.

These marks coincided with us moving into a 6-week rental apartment to be closer to our dumpster construction site. In an attempt to pinpoint the cause, I stopped going to the apartment altogether. The marks kept appearing anyway.

Naturally, like any adult who’s ridden the subway, I assumed the worst: bed bugs.

I tore through mattress corners, baseboards, couch cracks, dog beds, and drawer seams.

We had an exterminator come through. They found nothing.

We took the dogs to the vet. Nothing.

I went to the doctor. Nothing.

I washed and dried dozens of loads of laundry on high heat (I’m afraid to see our gas bill). Then, I bagged every pillow, blanket, and item of clothing and stacked them on the porch. To any passersby, it looked like 11 metric tonnes of garbage bags barricading our front door.

Each day, I vacuumed, laundered, and scoured.

I drove across the border to Trump’s America to search for illegal bug-killing chemicals.

I dusted diatomaceous earth across baseboards and bedframes.

I started taking allergy meds, just in case.

I slept in a cast-off bedroom.

Like a sad vacationer with lost bags, I spent the holidays living out of a hand-luggage-sized wardrobe deemed safe to reenter the house.

And still, the “bites” continued.

As of this writing, I am still getting red marks. While they’ve died down, every week or so, I get a new crop of sporadic, itchy red welts.

You may be thinking, did anyone else get “bit”?

No.

And believe me, like any irresponsible adult with nothing left to lose, I created ample opportunity. Over the last two months, we’ve hosted several overnighters. My husband (whom I live, eat, and breathe with) has also remained unscathed.

While my weeks-long work-up may sound abbreviated, the trial and error, wishing it away, thinking it’s gone, reappearing, research and discovery, mental toll, and bottomless loads of laundry, have taken up an appalling amount of time.

And so, I’ve had time to sit with Gay and think about what I might be avoiding while I’ve tended to house and rash.

What uncomfortable thing could I be skirting as I vacuum baseboards, log symptoms into ChatGBT, and lay awake at night with tickle tyranny?

I don’t know.

I also don’t want to assign all of this bad luck to myself. Some things are self-inflicted. Others are unavoidable.

Maybe the real sabotage isn’t a rash, or a brown tooth, or a cold, but the urge to look too deeply for meaning instead of creating it.

Some things are just itchy.