No, no. A thousand times, NO.

As sure as I felt that this was wrong with a capital W, the second guessing began. Had it really been that bad? Was he simply being friendly? Did I misunderstand something? Was I being too sensitive? Too defensive? The debate rang in my head as I paddled back out to my friends, got as far away from him as I could.

“Do not fucking touch me” I said as I explained the situation to my friends, pointing him out, warning them not to get too close. “Oh yea, he gave me a creepy vibe” said one of them. “Yea he got super close to me and was trying to talk to me too” said another.

I had seen this same guy there the last time I was surfing and he’d creeped me out then, getting too close, looking at me for too long. The only reason I spoke to him this time was out of guilt that perhaps I’d been rude in the past. Classic.

“Do not fucking touch me.” I said to my husband, hearing the fierceness in my own voice as I told him the story. Hearing my own certainty, the clarity of my anger. Realizing in my bones that I had every right to be as upset as I was. Realizing that I was entitled to trust the stone I feel in my guts when something is not okay, when someone has crossed the line.

“Do not fucking touch me.”

Words I had not said in the moment. Words I swallowed because I didn’t want to overreact or offend, didn’t want to cause a scene. How many times have I swallowed these words? How many times have I clamped my lips into a tight smile, denied the anger beating like a drum inside my chest?

The rage I felt for the rest of the day surprised me. I felt it in all its fiery glory.

I let it in. His entitlement. The inappropriateness of what he had done. I let myself feel it, feel what it had meant to me.

I need to feel these things in full so I can let them go. So I can release them and move on. Trying to stuff anger down and out of sight doesn’t work for me. That only makes it more powerful, leaking out at inopportune moments, beyond my control.

I had a fight with my husband that same night. I was getting really worked up talking about what had happened, and he tried to get me to calm down. He tried to touch me, take hold of my hand, put his arm around me.

But the anger was still hot inside my chest, my body primed for a fight. His touch felt like control, like restraint. My body suddenly hyper-aware of the size differential between us, my relative weakness. I recoiled at his touch.

It felt like all the other times men have put their hands on me, been deaf to my resistance. All the other times they have put their arms around my shoulders, refused to acknowledge the way my body stiffened under their touch. Aware only of their own experience, their desire to touch something that they wanted.

It’s hard not to be angry about all of those times. Not to carry them inside of me. The sheer volume accumulated over the years. The anger leaks out sometimes, out of all proportion to the situation at hand.

“Please just don’t touch me right now.” I said. “I just need you not to touch me right now.”

I could see that he was hurt, confused, but I needed space. My body needed space. From him, from all of them. I needed him to understand that.

We talked about it. He understood.

I heard a child on the street this morning screaming “no, no, no, no” over and over again. The terrible twos had clearly set in. This was a child beginning to understand himself in the world, to have a sense of his own separateness, his boundaries. The concept of “no” is such a formative part of our development, the very word an assertion of self. Me. Mine. No.

Perhaps my anger was out of proportion to the creepy stranger yesterday. It’s really hard to say. It’s hard to know how to react in these moments, how to take it all in stride. How to keep the cumulative weight of a lifetime from tumbling out each time something like this happens.

Is it even fair to expect that we be generous in these situations? That we give people the benefit of the doubt, despite a lifetime of evidence to the contrary? Mistaking good guys for bad guys is unfair, I get that. But mistaking bad guys for good? The stakes are so much higher.

I want to be a friendly person, an open person. I want to be able to engage with guys I meet in the world without always worrying that I might be “giving them the wrong impression”, somehow opening the door for something shady to happen. I do not enjoy feeling that I must always be on guard, always on the lookout for ulterior motives.

There are so many great guys in the world, I want to be able to be friendly when I meet them surfing, or at the gym, or standing in line at the grocery store. Connecting with other human beings is one of the nicest feelings in the world. I do not want to deny myself this because I am afraid.

But it’s hard not to close myself off when I have these experiences. When I realize that some men feel they have the liberty to put their hands on me, simply because I returned their friendliness. This happened to me just a few weeks ago at a tourist spot in San Francisco.

My friend and I were chatting with this woman and her husband who were standing near us, then out of nowhere the guy puts his arm around me, mimicking like we’re going to take a selfie. I felt my entire body go rigid while inside I was absolutely squirming. Where did that come from? What on earth gave him the impression that it was okay to do that?

What made him think it was fine to just touch me like that, to put his arm around my shoulders that way? Such a possessive gesture. A person he’s just met. It’s mindboggling to me, the arrogance of it.

It’s deeply unsettling to be on the receiving end of things like this. Maybe that’s what many guys don’t understand. Just how violated we actually feel in these situations. This is MY body and I decide who touches it. That’s how this works. Me. Mine. No.

When that unspoken rule is broken, it makes me deeply uncomfortable, and it makes me deeply angry.