Touch

I have always been unable to tolerate being touched. One of the first things my parents noticed about me as a baby was that, as soon as I had enough strength in my arms, I would try to push them away whenever they picked me up or cuddled me. Even now, although I can bring myself to hug close friends, and am gradually beginning to understand why people might touch voluntarily, I am left shuddering and distressed if I accidentally brush against someone in a crowd. Since, in most other respects, I can usually contrive to pass nowadays as "normal-if-a-bit-shy-and-eccentric", some people only realise quite how far from "normal" I actually am when they put a friendly hand on my arm and see me flinch visibly.

When I was doing voluntary work at a school for children with autism, one teacher, keen to understand a problem which many of the pupils share, asked me if it was a physical pain or an emotional aversion. I couldn't find a way to explain that it was neither. Touch feels invasive, overwhelming and claustrophobic - but it isn't actually painful; if it was only a physical pain, I might find it easier to handle. It isn't emotional either - it applies equally to people I love and people I hate (although with people I trust it is sometimes easier to overcome), and it feels far too visceral, too physiological to be an emotion. Ultimately, the only way I can describe how touch feels to me is to compare it to the sensation most people have hearing a knife scraping on a plate. The most plausible explanation, in the light of current research, postulates a malfunction of the part of the brain (possibly in the cerebellum) responsible for setting the "volume" of the different sensory inputs. So an ordinary touch feels like an invasion.

Various people, though, have instantly assumed that it must be the result of abuse or some other trauma (I can only say that it isn't). The clinical psychologist I visited briefly in my teens decided that it was obvious proof that I was sexually repressed, her favoured explanation of all my problems. I am still angry now that she didn't recognise it as a common feature of Asperger's syndrome, the form of "mild" or "high-functioning" autism with which I was finally diagnosed years later (and which also explains my inability to grasp social rules, my obsessiveness, and endless other features which no-one had thought to see as a whole until then). She looked at it only in terms of what touch meant to her, and the symbolic meanings it had in her theory, and never considered that it could have an utterly different meaning for me. In a way, it was fortunate that she was so crass - this banal Freudian cliche finally provoked me into realizing, insecure and full of self-doubt though I was, that I knew she was wrong. I knew what I felt, and I knew that it didn't fit any of the pop-psychology explanations I was being offered, even though it wasn't until several years later that I found a name and an official validation for my experiences. Consequently, touch and its various possible meanings have become a symbol for me of a long struggle to reject other people's interpretations until I found something that "rang true" for me.