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3:02am July 27, 2014
autistic-mom asked: My stimming is identical to my childhood stimming. I probably did it in utero, since I moved for several minutes at a time almost constantly. I was abused into hiding my stimming, but I could never stop. Every day of my life, usually countless times, I flap my hands, arms, and fingers. Just like autistic kids in tragedy videos. It's basically Why I'm Sure I wasn't misdiagnosed.

The thing about stimming in utero is interesting because my mother tells me I moved rhythmically inside her in a way that she really noticed, and I know another autistic person whose mother saw them rocking as a baby and said “Oh so that’s what you were doing in there.”

I think my earliest stim was rocking my head, that’s what my mother says anyway.  I’ve always had that, and hand flapping, and complex finger movements near my eyes.  When I was a teenager, they actually bought me a rocking chair to make my rocking look more ‘normal’.  But I also had a lot of things in childhood like rhythmic eye blinking that I don’t really do anymore.  And I also acquired a lot of complicated body movements that I didn’t start out with.

I also could hide it but not stop it.  Sometimes I’d suppress it around people and the moment I was alone it would come out – or the moment I thought I was alone, and then it would terrify me if someone had seen it.  It seemed more explosive when it did happen, the longer I suppressed it though.

The amount of time I spend stimming has varied really drastically over the course of my lifetime.  There was a time in my early adulthood when it was nearly 100% of the time.  And then the adrenal insufficiency either appeared or got more severe all at once – and very suddenly I barely stimmed at all, and I all but lost most of my full-body stims including what had been almost constant rocking before the health crisis.  The stims I retained were mostly hand movements and that’s still the case.  With the adrenal insufficiency being treated, I stim more than I did before treatment, but still less than I did before that health crisis hit.  It makes me wonder if there’s some link between cortisol level and stimming for some people.

Right now, it’s still that most of my stims are hand movements.  Some of which I’ve always had (you can even see hand and finger stuff in some pictures from young childhood), and some of which are newer.  

There’s some stims I do that seem to come out at the spur of the moment, different every time.  And some that have been consistent across time, for either a long period or for pretty much forever.  I think some of the hand and finger stims have been the most consistent across time for me, but some have disappeared and some have popped up.  

And sometimes the nature of the stimming stays roughly the same but the form changes – how much of my body I rock (head, top of torso, full torso, head+torso+legs while standing), how fast I rock, how far the rocking movement goes (tiny movements, or slamming back and forth very far), whether I rock side to side or back to front, and other things about rocking have varied a lot over time (and simply day to day) for instance. 

Notes:
  1. arctic-hands reblogged this from withasmoothroundstone and added:
    I didn’t know stimming in utero was a thing. That intrigues me.
  2. autistic-mom said: Third paragraph is just like me.
  3. withasmoothroundstone posted this