5:02am November 15, 2014

Pet peeve #4282134

Autistic people. Autistic people, for crying out loud. Who love to spread around the idea that “looking autistic” means “visibly stimming all the time”. Yes, that’s one way to look autistic. It is not the only way to look autistic. I have had total strangers peg me as autistic when I was not moving much at all. (Too little movement is as much s sign of autism as too much movement. Too little and too much compared to the norm, that is.)

My stalker loved to tell me which of my videos I “looked autistic” in and which I didn’t, and it was all based on stimming. Given she claimed to be the world’s only real autistic person who could communicate, you’d think she’d know a little more about autism. Another time, after my adrenal insufficiency had stopped my constant stimming from happening, I had this really annoying “friend” (in the loosest sense possible) who would tell me I “didn’t look autistic” unless I stimmed, and also that I “didn’t look like myself” unless I stimmed, and if I did stim she’d go “Oh hello Amanda there’s your real self…” and I’d want to smack her.one. Because the reason I wasn’t constantly stimming was because I didn’t have constant high levels of cortisol pumping through my system anymore. In fact I barely had enough cortisol to live on.

So if you feel tempted to say stuff like this to or about other autistic people, just STFU before you embarrass yourself. When I can walk into a proctologist’s office as a teenger, not stimming at all, in fact sitting without moving whatoever, and he turns to my parents and asks ‘Autistic?” Then you know that stimming is not the only way to look autistic. Especially given he was a proctologist and even he could tell I was autistic at a glance. And mind you he thought I was so autistic that he was shocked when I started talking.

P.S. The “friend” who didn’t think I was “me” if I didn’t stim, also decided that I was really a high functioning person with health problems, rather than the low functioning person she’d once thought. Never did it cross her mind that it was the health problems preventing the stimming, not the other way around.

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