On holding and being held

I don't consider myself a particularly tactile person. I'm always a bit nervous of what a hug says and what it means and what I'm opening myself up to when I open my arms. I don't read other people very well and I never really know what is being said by a hug. My natural wariness steps in and I hold myself back, never sure whether a hug is welcome or appropriate. I find it so hard to truly relax around people that I can't just accept or give hugs randomly.

The truth is that I am an extremely tactile person who ends up limiting her need for physical contact to just three people: I envelop my Mum; hang from my Dad's shoulders; cling to my Big Sis. There is no way that they will ever construe my need for physical contact as anything other than innocent and affectionate.

Of course, it isn't just affection that motivates me. Touch is necessary to my mental wellbeing. The crazy day that I describe in my previous post (which developed into a full-blown crazy week) is something that comes from a need for sensation. I get so bored and so frustrated that I start reconfiguring everything as a physical experience: I feel the need to cling/touch/throw/hit/climb/push. And most of all I feel the need to be suppressed. To be clamped down until I've calmed down.

But it's a difficult thing to ask of people. Sometimes I just wish for a hug machine because being suppressed is pretty much all I need and then you don't have the tricky having-to-ask-people-to-hold-you-until-the-craziness-goes-away problem.

The problem remains that I both want and need human contact (for a start, there must be a certain amount of peril involved in using a mechanical hug; you wouldn't want to get too squished, for example). But I can't rely purely on friends and family to provide that. I guess that this, like so much else at the moment, leads back tediously to the fact that I am lonely.