as small as a world and as large as alone

2:17pm July 28, 2014

Could you post some more about visual stims? I’m trying to find alternative stims to my current ones. I have this croak-like vocal stim that hurts my throat after a while. It and a lot of my other stims are vocal and they bug people. Any ideas?

I have always done a lot lot lot of visual stimming.

Blinking my eyes over and over and over and over and over really fast, to watch the “clouds” jump around the room.  I don’t know if everyone has “clouds” though.  That may be part of my status migraine aura thingy.

Staring at one spot intently until the entire room fades out.

Staring at objects of particular colors and patterns that I like.

Watching rotating things like ceiling fans.  Both just watching, but also tracking the rotation with my eyes to make them look like they’re stopping or moving at different rates, and things like that.  There’s a lot more activeness in watching ceiling fans than a lot of people appreciate.

Wiggling my fingers near my eyes.

Holding objects near my eyes, and possibly moving them around.

Waving things in front of my eyes.

Looking at things through colored pieces of glass or plastic or other things like that.

Making my eyes water and squinting through the water to get various visual effects including sometimes prismatic ones.

Staring at light through my hair, to see the rainbows inside my hair.

Closing one eye and staring at my nose, to see the “mountain”.  (I grew up in Silicon Valley and the mountains in the distance reminded me of my nose or vice versa, for some reason.)

Prisms.  Including hanging prismatic objects in windows and watching the rainbows dance around the room.

Those glasses that put rainbows around everything.

Collecting all kinds of objects that are visually interesting.  There’s a fine line between visually interesting and visually overloading, for me, though, so I have to be careful.  Things like tiger’s eye, lots of different stones are good, there’s beautiful glasswork that exists, lots of things.

When you are watching something, it can be a very active experience where you’re actively changing the way you see it, or a more passive one where you’re just taking something in.  Both are fine, they’re just different approaches.

I also have a lot of very atypical visual problems.  I have what may be a constant migraine aura that means I see colors and patterns in the air all the time, and have my entire life.  My vision fragments into pieces very easily.  I have trouble identifying objects by sight.

And so… I grew up actually with vision often as more of a ‘stim’ thing than a useful thing.  And I grew up using a lot of my visual problems as takeoff points for visual stimming.  When things fragment and fall into pieces and have weird colors superimposed on them, they become more interesting to look at than they are useful to look at, if that makes any sense.  

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