No Touching

DISCLAIMER: THIS POST WILL GET CREEPY.  AGAIN.  THERE IS NO MAYBE.  IT WILL DEFINITELY GET WEIRD. JUST SAYING.

I don't know when I became a don't-touch-me kind of person.

I mean I remember being a little kid and holding my mom's hand across the street, and I remember taking naps with my sister, but after that it gets kind of fuzzy.

It's not something you notice right away. You feel normal. Like you're no different. But then someone taps you on the shoulder, and they can see you flinch, even though you can't feel yourself doing it.

You find your natural posture to be that of a losing man in a boxing ring right before the bell rings: fists at your sides, elbows in, feet apart. Scared. And you know what? People notice. They don't touch you. People don't touch you if your hands are constant fists.

It's then that you notice. You realize how you get this sick, confused feeling whenever you have to tap someone to get their attention, whenever you have to shake hands.

And then there's the hug - looming over you, coming closer, arms outspread, gaining, gaining, and right before you meet them, you close your eyes and everything goes fuzzy and you lose a sense of consciousness for that small second. Sometimes you slip up. Your head goes up too far, down too far, your arm gets caught in the space under the arm and above the shoulder. Your foot stutters, you pick the wrong side. So many things go wrong with hugging. So many things.

Touching is a normal human tendency. It's healthy, physically and emotionally. It lets you know you're not alone. Which is why I'm starting to worry that maybe I have a problem and need to get this figured out.

It isn't that it hurts, being touched. I researched this stuff. It's called tactile defensiveness. That's when you don't like people touching you because it feels painful or uncomfortable or emotionally overbearing. But the thing is, people with this thing are usually okay touching people themselves, when they want to and when they're in control of the touching.

But I don't know how to touch people. And the truth is, I really do want to. Which is a weird thing to say, I know, but I do. I want to touch people. Everybody does, jeez. It's only human. I just have trouble turning feeling into touch. Here, I'll set up a list.

Most people naturally turn friendliness into hand-shaking, and anger into punching, and love into hugging, and so forth. They don't have to think about it, it's just what they do. But touching is so hard for me. When I really, really feel like touching someone, there's so much anxiety and emotion and confusion it always turns out wrong.

Like, sometimes I'll love someone so much I'll just-

They've gotten used to it, I think. They're starting to catch on. After the unexpected action follows a silence and a look and an acknowledgement of what was meant to be a hug. Nothing needs to be explained.

And that's what's so scary about touching.

When you're sitting a good distance apart, turning words out of your mouths and so forth, you can say whatever you want to. You can hide your feelings, with words. It's easy. All you have to do is say 'I hate you' and twist your face around right, and no one will know it's not true.

But with touching, there's electricity involved. You're cutting a current, a neuron path from one body to the next, and it's like you can feel their own heart beating with yours, and you know what they're feeling, you know what they're thinking. You know because you can feel them. 

You can feel them feeling.

It doesn't matter how you're touched - hand to hand, fist to stomach, knee to elbow - they know what you're doing. They can match the right emotion with the wrong action. They know that punch was meant to be a hug, they know what you're feeling, they know what you're not, and you can't hide. And I hate when I can't hide. 

Most of the time.

Most of the time.

Some of the times, I don't. Just some of the times.

But the thing about never being touched is, after so long, it gets to be dangerous. A fear of touch built up over time results in turning you into an erratically made twitching time bomb, sitting alone on a bench. A body starved of unspoken feeling gets sensitive, it gets jumpy. It forgets what to do. One time I got patted on the head and started crying. 

So, please don't touch me. It may go wrong. It usually goes wrong. I don't like being touched because touching means hurting. In Native American culture, the closer a soldier came to his enemy, the braver he proved to be. If he got close enough to touch his enemy, to tap him on the shoulder, or leg or something, he was known as a brave man.

If you're close enough to touch a body you're close enough to hurt a body, and maybe that's reason enough to squirm away. Maybe I hate people touching me because I don't want them to know what I feel, or because I don't like to get hurt. 

Or maybe it's just because intimacy frightens the living hell out of me.

Please take the sign off my back. Please, I'm begging you. That sticky-note that's supposed to say 'Kick me' says 'NO TOUCHING', and it hangs off my neck like a protest sign. What am I supposed to change the sign to now? 'NO TOUCHING'? 'I DON'T REALLY LIKE TOUCHING BUT PLEASE I'M ONLY HUMAN'? 'DON'T TAKE THIS THE WRONG WAY BUT I MEAN EVERY ONCE IN AWHILE COULD WE SKIP THE HIGH FIVE AND HOLD IT FOR A SECOND EVEN THOUGH I FLINCH BECAUSE I DON'T TRUST PEOPLE?'

It's a difficult situation.

I'm doing a very brave thing, saying this. You could use it against me. All suddenly become unapologetically huggy, and touchy. Asking me to play hand games and crap.

Defensive measures will be taken. 

There will be blood.

I'm not yet sure what has been concluded from all this. Do I really not like to be touched? 

Do I not like to be touched by certain people? Definitely. Can I at times be inappropriate in touching certain people? Definitely.

Should I have typed that sentence? No.

I guess, in the end, I'm just another tree monster, and the forest is a lonely place. We surround ourselves with branches so the outside can't come in, while the inside's just an empty spot waiting for a hand to hold. It's a hollow kind of place. It hurts to touch and it hurts not to, and I think, when it comes right down to it, we just don't want to heal anyways.