I wanted to say something about stimming
autistic people should be welcome to stim wherever they are
Stimming expresses something that other forms of communication can’t get to.
Stimming is self-stimulatory, repetitive behaviour, it’s often a feature of autism. It can take the shape of repeated words, phrases or movements.
Stimming happens for me when I’m trying to process something, when there’s been too much input, too much new, and my system needs to find a way to recalibrate. Good things too, good days and glistening days also need to be processed and expressed.
My experience of stimming is mostly verbal (echolalia and palilalia). It often begins as a hum and then flowers into words, not sentences: a phrase, or fragments of a phrase, again and again and again. Some days stimming is balloons rising up, out of my chest, bursting into confetti as they float out of my mouth. Some days it’s conducting a cyclone with words, finding a centre in the movement, cradling a storm to sleep.
Stimming; letting these words come up and out is the exact soothing I need but don’t know how to ask for. Stimming is exactly right. I find that the words I use when I’m stimming aren’t random; they are made-up of particles I’ve been able to collect from the thing that was difficult to process.
I was in a cafe in Brighton yesterday, the best place to go for a matcha, the sea just around the corner. Every table was taken. People working, people reading and people meeting friends. A mother and her child asked if they could sit on the empty chairs at my table.
The child announced their cuddly friend, popped him on the table beside my cup, a slightly weathered toy penguin with kind chocolate button eyes. We made our introductions. The mother asked the penguin how his day had been. The child spoke, matter of factly. “He’s had a bad day. Really, really, really bad. Big day, silly. Silly. Really bad day. Bad day. Big and big. Really silly.”
We sighed, all three of us, nodding our understanding.
The child’s way of speaking: repetition of a phrase, fragmenting a phrase, made me think of stimming. This is close to what it sounds like sometimes when I stim. The words can be, for me and for whoever is with me, a map to what is going on, pointing to what is hard to process, what needs more time and space to sink in and settle.
It feels delicate (risky, maybe) to compare stimming to something childlike. Being perceived as a child as a result of showing my autistic traits is a valid concern for me in my life. But I think there can be a childlike energy to stimming. A simple power in listening to the waves of your interior world. Releasing energy that doesn’t want to be trapped, unburdened by the (interfering, restrictive, nonsensical!) rules of being a ‘proper adult’. I am learning not to see stimming as a sign of weakness or smallness, but as an ability to go direct, to not hold back from acknowledging and expressing the intensity of things. Things are really intense.
In her book Looking After Your Autistic Self, Niamh Garvey says "autistic people should always be welcome to stim wherever they are.". That’s not a world we’re close to being in, I don’t think. I hope for it, but I don’t feel it. Really, really hope for it. There’s only two people I feel comfortable to stim in front of. I have kind, loving, magic people around me but stimming still feels very vulnerable, it’s scary to me, the stakes feel high. My whole self holds it all in tightly until I’m home. I think stimming can unsettle other people. It can make them feel concerned or confused. It can lead to mocking and othering and judgements about capacity in other realms of life. But it feels so essential to me being able to fully be somewhere. To be able to have my own way to process experiences and interactions so I can move through them. When I am welcome to stim freely, I am capacious. When I am not welcome to stim, things get stuck.
One of my safe people, someone precious, started repeating back to me the words I was saying as I was stimming. This overwhelmed me.
It transformed the act of stimming into something I don’t know how to explain.
Made it an exchange that could only happen in this place beyond sentences.
i see you
it’s ok
tell me
yes!
what else?
Thanks for reading Strange Cape.
Take care,
Sarah x
Whenever I read your words it's like I can feel them coming off of the page and they're real tangible feelings and moments in front of me (I can't articulate it but it's a kind of magic). It's a privilege to read about how you experience the world my friend. I hope you can fully be everywhere you wish to be sometime very soon. You deserve it so much x