I miss you more than I should, than I thought I could.

So I was thinking about the problem I have with touching, hugging, holding, being physical with people. It, contact that is, has always made me feel really really uncomfortable unless it’s agreed upon in a specific way…like a hug is usually a quick thing and both people intend to pull away at a certain point. Knowing when you’re going to disengage the physical contact is part of it. With most situations like that I don’t know when it’s going to happen and I worry that I’ll hold on too long and make the other person feel weird somehow, or if I disengage too quickly or react to quickly and make them feel rebuffed. That always runs though my head, and I try to relax and be natural about physical contact but I still always have this tension in me.

Also, physical contact is very shocking to me, especially bare skin to bare skin. Like it is unpleasant to be bumped in a subway, but it’s REALLY unpleasant for someone (anyone really) to suddenly touch my bare hand. I realize the social cues for things like that…to reinforce communication and familiarity, to emphasize a point. But to touch me is to invade my person. Also really touchy people I tend to misinterpret as people interested in my sexually, which is often false, and I make this assumption because it’s often a flirtatious thing to touch someone, but also it’s not sometimes so it’s hard for me to tell.

This is all in direct contrast with how I feel about touching animals, which I love to pet and sit with on my lap and I love to feel the weight of a dog or cat against my back as I fall asleep. I love the different shapes of dogs and cats faces, and to touch the strange contours. I know how wierd that sounds, but it's true. So but I can fall asleep with animals nearby. That’s nice, even comforting. But I can’t sleep in the same bed as someone else, I’ve found, because I listen to their breathing and think about the sounds my stomach makes and how maybe my nose whistles while I try to lie quietly beside them. So I don’t sleep. Except with Caitlin in the room…for some reason, I learned to let myself be and I loved to listen to her gentle sleep sounds…but then, I was in love with her, so there’s that. We had very few bounderies between us, in the end.

I want to find a way to let myself be as other people are, and be less sensitized to touch in these ways. It has been true for as far back as I can remember. I’m not as sensitive to sound anymore, but I still cover my ears or leave the room if there are sounds that are too loud, or if there is a sound that scratches a nerve inside me I react in a physical way. I used not be able to sleep with music or ay sounds at all. The loudness of my friend's cars, the sound of their music especially base (which still bothers me sometimes) would make me feel physically sick. There are so many ways, I find, that I am terrifically different from others, from everyone I know. A lot of it is neurosis (or possibly psychosis), tied to my brain being...off.

I wish I were like normal people. I was thinking about this as I was trying to sleep tonight. It's really lonely sometimes.