Want intimacy? Give up your boundaries- they aren't real anyway

There's this thing that comes up, really often, when people share their fears and desires. I often hear people say that they really want connection but that they also fear closeness, they want a relationship but they fear intimacy. I'm one of these people. I know I want love, I know I want relationship and then I watch myself pulling away from it when people reach out or when they get close. It kind of drives me crazy, watching myself repeatedly doing this thing (pulling away) that sabotages my own happiness and ease (connection to others). But at the same time that I'm watching it, I'm feeling helpless about it, like I don't have the strength to not pull away from others. For me, part of it is a gut reaction, a fearful defense, and so by the time I notice it, I've already done the pushing away and so the connection (or the potential for it) is gone.
This weekend, I was watching myself do this. I actually watched myself put up boundaries between myself and my two friends. At first, I tried to understand it, tried to figure out why I was putting up boundaries where before I had been open. I reflected on the fact that earlier in the week, boundaries had unintentionally been crossed and it had scared me, put me in a place where I wasn't in control, where I was vulnerable, and in which I saw things in myself and in my family that were unsettling. They were true, they were things that I had to see, but they had also made me cry and feel off for a while so I felt like, "Oh, you're protecting yourself, you need a break from the intimacy, it was a little too much and you need to recover."
Next I decided that having boundaries was part of me. I decided that my friends needed to understand this about me, they needed to respect that I was someone who needed boundaries for safety and that if they would just respect them, I would feel safe enough to cross them. I considered telling them when they crossed these boundaries, and asking them to step back, and not cross it again until I was ready. But I knew too that when they had crossed my boundary earlier in the week, they had taught me things about myself. That even though their crossing had hurt me, it had been helpful to me too. And also, they're my friends, I kind of think that they're supposed to bump and poke me, and that they're doing it because they want to get close to me, to know me, and by insisting on these boundaries, I'm keeping them out of my life.
Then I thought about something I had shared in my way-seeking-mind talk. I had shared an experience I had in which I watched two people whom I thought I was close with, develop a close friendship, and been confused by it. I didn't understand why they were close to each other but not with me. What I finally discovered was that they were close to each other because they actually shared with each other. Though I was friends with both of them, had listened to them share themselves and their lives, I hadn't shared my self with them and that if I wanted that closeness, I needed to start sharing myself too. Thinking about this made me realize that I can't just say that this is part of me, that I have boundaries and you need to respect them. I knew that I had to let go of this need for boundaries and this fear of them being crossed.
But still, I didn't know how to do it, still don't know how.

This morning, during zazen, I was thinking about boundaries and how artificial they are. I was thinking about Mel Weistman's talk about Dogen's koan about what he learned in China: his eyes are horizontal and his nose is vertical. I thought about this concept: that on the one hand, everything is the same (eyes are horizontal) and on the other, everything is unique (nose is vertical) and that we are all interconnected and separate at the same time. And I thought "Oh, no wonder boundaries cause me such suffering, they aren't the truth."
I want to believe that I can put up boundaries around me to keep myself separate from others. I want to deny the interconnectedness of myself with others but I can't. I can't protect myself from their poking, their prodding, their love. I guess I can. I can insist on these boundaries, I can ask them to respect them, I can enforce them, but I don't think it's actually going to work. The boundaries aren't real, I'm making them up, which to me means they aren't really going to protect me the way I want them to. Since they aren't reality, they're just going to bring me more suffering, they're going to add to the pain. I might as well just accept the poking and prodding and unsettling since it's coming anyway.
Believe me, I'm not going to be all open and vulnerable and 'la la la' now, but I guess I see that the boundaries that I put up really aren't that effective. The security that I think I get from them isn't real or reliable. People are going to poke me, I'm going to get hurt and if I keep up the boundaries, I get poked and hurt all alone; but if I let the boundaries down, I get the same hurt but with my friends. They'll be there to maybe see me too, to maybe help me be compassionate with myself, to put a gentle hand on my shoulder and say "I'm here, I see you, and I love you anyway."