8:55pm July 26, 2014

andromedalogic-grackalacking-replied-to-your

andromedalogic:

grackalacking replied to your post: obstinatecondolement replied to your…

holy shit reallyy???? this changes so much thank you

yes, really. virtually every late-diagnosed autistic person i know has copied other autistic people to relearn natural mannerisms; so…

Semi-related: I’m autistic and sometimes I forget that I CAN stim. And then I remember and start flapping or something and it’s like suddenly the world clicks into a sharper focus level and I just get this strong sense of *rightness*, like, this is how my body is supposed to move sometimes.

Yeah also echopraxia is a thing, and lots of autistic people have it, and this is one reason that is actually used by teachers and parents to justify keeping autistic children away from other autistic children, because they “pick up autistic behavior” from each other and that’s supposed to be horrible.

(Although some autistic people who have very, very severe movement issues have said that they have to avoid other autistic people or their movement issues become so severe they can’t communicate at all, and that much I can respect. But that’s not what’s going on when parents and teachers try to force autistic children to never ever see another autistic child.)

I remember also picking up the mannerisms of a girl with CP, once, too. Or rather picked up a bit of her gait for a few months – she came down harder on one foot than the other, and I kept finding myself doing that even when I wasn’t around her, and getting embarrassed.

Touretters pick up each other’s tics really fast too because of echopraxia.

And there’s a lot of overlap between stims and tics, especially because ‘stim’ isn’t a thing, really. It’s a word for every type of unusual movement or unusual sensory attention pattern that autistic people do, no matter the reason, whether it’s a tic or a way of processing information or a way of expressing emotion or a way of communicating (with people or with inanimate parts of the environment, because that happens too). And there’s a lot of grey areas between them too, like the difference between an autistic mannerism and a tic can be very subtle and there’s lots of gradations in between. And lots lots lots of overlap between autism and Tourette’s.

(I’m certain Tourette’s runs in my family. I read a description of it to my dad and he said “That’s my uncle, we thought he was just crazy” and then he thought a bit more and realized he had some minor tics, and I know I have tics. None of us have been diagnosed, but once you know how tics work, it’s usually pretty obvious whether you have a tic disorder or not. At least, as long as you haven’t built up a wall of denial around the whole thing, which can happen. And also if it’s mild or sometimes-suppressible you can wonder whether it’s voluntary or not, especially because tics often come with a sense of urgency and “I need to tic NOW!” to them. I used to think of both stimming and ticcing as shameful addictions, when I was growing up, it was the only context I had for anything like that, so I thought of myself like I was addicted to moving in certain ways and making certain noises and like no matter how long I suppressed it it would come out eventually, and I couldn’t “break the habit”. It made me feel horrible about myself.)

Anyway… autistic people pick up stims from each other all the time, both on purpose and by accident. Both of these things are completely okay. If anyone tells you otherwise, ask who died and made them the Stim Police. Seriously. People who do that need to find some better use of their time.

I actually got criticized online at one point for rocking improperly in a video. I didn’t know there was a proper and improper way to rock but a couple people were dead certain that I didn’t know how to rock properly and was therefore imitating rocking, badly. The funny thing was, I went to a DD conference a few days later, where lots of people rocked in exactly the way that I was rocking in the video. So either the conference was full of people who didn’t know how to rock, or the Stim Police are full of shit.

There are, by the way, tons of ways that autistic people rock, and if you learn to tell the difference you can tell a lot about someone’s mood, what they’re paying attention to, and all kinds of other things. But it won’t tell you whether the person is autistic or not, because there’s no single 'proper autistic way to rock’.

There’s also not a thing where when you’re autistic you stim in one way and one way only. Most autistic people stim differently in different situations. I actually had someone get on my case because they’d only ever seen me wiggle my fingers by my face. And then they saw me rocking while holding a toy and insisted that I’d somehow done something horrible by changing the way I stimmed and therefore not being myself anymore and not being genuine because real autistic people only stim in one way and…. I can’t even.

Also, my stimming has evolved over time. It’s not identical to how it was in my childhood, because I’m older now. Some of it is stuff I’ve picked up from others but other parts are just my body doing what feels right when it feels right to do it, and learning to go with that instead of suppressing it, for the most part.

Notes: