Don't Stand So Close to Me by The Police just came on the radio.

I was molested by a teacher in high school. It's been so long that it's nothing personal anymore, just a fact of my childhood that subtly influences who I am today.

Anyhow, it's been over nine years since that period of my life, but the song still gets to me the same as ever. I stop whatever I'm doing, my heart in my throat, caught up in a momentary flash of memories. I wonder how much all of that stuff still affects the way I approach intimacy and relationships now.

It used to be that I was unable to be intimate with anyone, sexually or otherwise. Eventually, I moved to on from that to a form of interaction where I was sexually intimate with a number of people, but I used sexuality to kill emotional intimacy and was even less able to be emotionally close to anyone.

The last five or six years, I have made a better effort towards attempting relationships that were both physically and emotionally intimate. Sometimes I've done alright. Other times I've failed miserably. There are still triggers that cause me to panic. I still act in ways that are completely destructive. I still oscillate between several poor behavioral patterns.

Sometimes I return to over-sexuality, using sexuality as an emotional barrier. There is an urge, when I feel myself becoming especially close to someone, to reach out and be sexual with others so as to wound and scare the one person away. Certainly not a healthy inclination. I am not proud to say that I have given into this inclination several times over the years. It generally has not ended the relationships, but it has damaged them so severely that they never really recovered.

Other times, I find myself unable to be sexual at the same time as I am emotionally intimate. During times like this I have forced my partners to deal with prolonged frigidity, even partners with whom I had previously been sexual. It seemed almost a test, to see if they could still care for me and be with me without my sexual side. Or maybe, again, I was subconsciously acting to wound and scare them away.

I don't oscillate back and forth as wildly as I once did, but I think that it's still there on a smaller scale. I believe I still do things to subtly damage relationships and push people away because, deep down, I'm still scared.

But then again, aren't we all scared? People who never had poor sexual experiences are still scared of intimacy, of commitment. Maybe I'm over-analyzing, being too ego-centric. I'm not sure.

It's strange, though, how a single song can churn up this whole mess of thoughts. Always, whenever I hear the song. And I almost never think of them otherwise.