Feeling guilty about stimming

[Cutesie]

Without going into an exhaustive history of my stimming (which is tempting to do), I'll try to make it brief. I stimmed a lot as a kid (rocking the most prominent one), then much of it seemed to just disappear. I have no memory of trying to stop.

When I went into mental health crisis fourteen years ago, a lot of stimming returned. Now there are many days when it's happening every couple of minutes. It's finger wringing and hand twisting that I do a good deal, probably because that works for walking, which I do for hours at a time.

There's another reason that those stims are common for me, I think. They are the strange, stereotypical stims that I was used to seeing in autistics. My brother Ikey (pseudonym) used to do it a ton. (Now my fingers move more than his.) Others, too. Like @AuroraBorealis mentioned here, my stimming increased with my self-diagnosis of ASD. Knowing this has caused discomfort, thinking that I'm faking it to "confirm" my autism.

It's not that that bothers me so much, though. I tend to stim more in front of other people. Some of this can be attributed to the added stresses of being in public - but not all of it. I can tell that I'm doing it on purpose to get attention. Not that the purposefulness is at the top of my consciousness. It's really confusing, by the way, to try figuring out how voluntary stimming is.

When I'm upset and isolated in my pain, I want to cry out to someone, anyone, that I'm hurting. I want to run around and scream, to let everyone know that I'm crazy. Instead, I stim in front of them. Why does this bother me so much? Because I feel that I'm misappropriating the autistic's tool for my non-autistic problems.

After the thrill of that initial discovery of my autism had died down, I'd started to question it. Maybe it was just ADHD or something like that. (I'm not diagnosed with that either, but it's quite clear that I have it.) Combine that with the my psychological issues and maybe it's not autism at all. Maybe I'm just finding an excuse to explain why I'm living a failed existence. Those thoughts had gotten so far that I could feel guilty about stealing a feature from this community.

Now that I'm back to thinking of myself as autistic, perhaps these thoughts will go away, and this post will just be a story of what once was.

 

[Jumpinbare]

FWIW, I found I was doing my main stim while reading your post.

 

[Cutesie]

My therapist says I stim twice as much as other ASDs and he attributes that to a lack of being able to express my emotions verbally. Both stimming and outbursts are emotional catharsis. Since I have little in the way of expressing myself verbally, that emerges as increased stimming.

This seems very familiar. On a good day, I'm stimming at least every couple of minutes. Each time is due to some stimulus of anxiety or, mire rarely, positive excitement. It could be anything that sets me off - sights, sounds, touch and my thoughts.

It's interesting that noticing my stimming level can tell me what mood I'm in. Often, I feel rotten but can't isolate what type of feeling it is. This week, for instance, I noticed how little I was stimming during a terrible meltdown. It was then that I realized that depression, rather than anxiety, was the driving force in my mind at the time.

 

[NDR2]

I stim verbally. I’ll talk or sing out loud. I did that regularly when I was a child. But people often gave me odd looks, laughed, commented, and even criticized me for it. My family in particular would tell me not to do those things. I kind of took it to heart, and tried to avoid stimming in public. I learned to do it under my breath. But my speech therapist told me that’s bad for my vocal chords.

I still more or less avoid stimming in public. I’ll just do it when I’m alone. My speech therapist says there’s no problem with talking to myself out loud or singing to myself in public. But due to past experiences, I’m too afraid to do so. I’m afraid people will notice and I’ll embarrass myself. Other people have said that here in New York City if you stim out loud and people look at you strangely, they’re probably from out of town. But I still feel afraid to actually do so.