I’ve never been able to satisfactorily explain this, but I don’t like to be touched. Unless I do.

And by never been able to satisfactorily explain it, I mean to anybody. Including myself.

People sometimes think or feel in huge generalities. I niche down. The big space is too nebulous for me.

There are maybe seven people on earth that I genuinely love to hug. Some of that is closeness weighted by distance. Some of that is finding a person who could legitimately be in the running for best hugger — a title I do not award lightly. If I regularly saw some of the people I love to hug most, I suspect the magic would wear thin. The rarity is part of it.

I have a few other long distance friends in a nice-to-hug category. But again. The distance. I mean some of those long distance friends live in Portland too. It’s just that I live in a vortex of sorts. Like that magic city in the musical that disappears and can only be found once in a hundred years. But in that one night there is one hell of a party. And then I need the next hundred years to recover my social battery. This is not an exaggeration. This is a weather report.

Then there are the people I’m neutral about hugging. I don’t mind doing it. I will do it sometimes without thinking. But not if I have to see them every day. It’s a socially acceptable and not unpleasant greeting. A way of showing solidarity and love. I really like that part of it.

It’s just the touching part.

In short: I don’t like to be touched. Unless I do.

Not wanting to be touched doesn’t extend to me touching things. I need to touch something to understand and experience it. I will touch nearly everything in a store like a very slow, very judgmental raccoon. Unless I don’t want to touch something and I have to because then I’ll vomit or straight up pass out.

So I have a whole internal taxonomy. A map. Preferences I’ve spent years learning and defending.

What I keep coming back to is that I had to learn them at all. The right to decide who gets into my physical space and when wasn’t just given to me. I had to earn it.

When I was a kid, you hugged on command. That was just manners.

I think my generation quietly rebelled against that. We gave our kids bodily autonomy, told them their no was valid, didn’t make them perform affection for anyone. Which is maybe surprising coming from the feral generation — the ones drinking out of garden hoses, coming home to an empty house every day after school, completely unsupervised until dark. You’d think we’d have been too checked out to notice. But maybe that’s exactly why we noticed. We knew what it felt like to not be asked.

In two days I turn 49. And I still have to remind myself that my body is my own.

I don’t like to be touched. Unless I do.

I’m still learning to trust that sentence.