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5:03pm July 27, 2014
arctic-hands reblogged your post: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.
I didn’t know stimming in utero was a thing. That intrigues me.
#Stimming#Autism
I’ve heard about it from a few people by now.  My mother says I rhythmically bounced off the walls of her uterus a lot and she always wondered what I was doing in there.  I’ve talked to a few other autistic people whose mothers said similar things, about feeling rhythmic motions inside them while they were pregnant, that were different from their pregnancies with nonautistic kids.
Since a lot of stimming is not voluntary, but rather an automatic movement that happens without the person thinking about it, this makes sense.  I know that my mother has also described me visibly stimming since infancy, and a lot of autistic babies rock their bodies or heads in their cribs.  I think some stimming is… something your body just does, and you can sometimes learn to suppress it but it’s not something you’re doing for a ‘reason’.  Like there is always a reason, somewhere in there, but it’s not something you’re doing because you know the reason, and it’s not something you're doing, it’s just something that happens.
That’s just one (actually, probably several kinds) of many kinds of stimming though.  Some kinds of stimming are voluntary.  Some kinds of stimming don’t originate in the womb or in infancy or even in childhood.  
“Stimming” is a word that doesn’t really mean a lot, which doesn’t help.  It only exists because professionals believed at one point that a huge number of unrelated things that developmentally disabled people did, were “self stimulatory behaviors”, and “stim” became the shorthand term for that.  And that ranged from involuntary movements, to voluntary movements, to things that are less movements and more exploration of the sensory environment.  And all of those things get called “stimming”.  I don’t even understand the question when people ask me “Is this stimming or not?” because “stimming” isn’t really a well-defined thing.  (And it’s definitely not just an autistic thing, and was never just an autistic thing, and did not originate only in descriptions of autistic people.)