When I started thinking I could be autistic I allowed myself to stim much more, and something I’ve noticed in the time since is that as a result I’m ticcing A LOT less.

I am definitely still ticcing, but I haven’t had my tics exhaust me for a while now, it used to be every day.

My current theory is that I was unconsciously stimming my whole life, “oh I always ticced but I was keeping it down” nope that was probably stimming.

But when I started the antidepressants, my guess is they did something to change how I regulate, I had no vent for stimulation in my body and it became tics.

And I think that’s all it comes down to, they are both just ways of regulating this energy in your body/brain but they just have different levels of urgency. Stims are usually lower urgency so you have greater control on how they come out, tics usually have much greater urgency so they can be completely unexpected and uncontrollable. And of course there is a whole world of middle ground in between the extremes.

Anyway those are my thoughts rn, they may change over time but this is what seems true to me at least.

Omg I just remembered one of the biggest stims I did as a kid: chewing/sucking my sleeves and collar. I ruined a few of my school jumpers and would often have damp marks from it. I remember my mum telling me to stop, I guess I did?

I feel really nostalgic about it now somehow.

Took out an old hoodie and look, physical evidence!

Imposter syndrome can choke on a shit!

ngl this stim is still S-tier for me.

though I can't explain why most food is disgusting to me but fabric in my mouth is just fine.

since I brought up a ranking, here is my tier list for stims I've rediscovered, were already doing without realising, or tried out just to see:

S: Bite/suck on thick fabric, Shake fists hard
A: Rattle/roll dice, Flap hands, Music, Rain Sounds, Jumping
B: Spin in circles, Rock side to side, Touch thumbs to fingers
C: Sway, Speed cube (sexy move), Pop-it
D: Alternate snapping fingers as fast as possible, Leg bounce, Tap face/head
F/Hell: Shiver, Blink hard, Scratching, Bite skin

Different stims seem to help with different things, and sometimes I recognise I'm starting to stress and haven't been stimming, so I'll have to cycle a few until I pick one that helps (sometimes hitting ones that make it worse on the way D:). It's much easier when the right one just comes unconsciously.

Also there is no E tier, this is partly due to the nature of stims, but mostly due to me not proof-reading ever.

okay, everyone stop,

you can get bracelets to chew on.

chewelry.

CHEWELRY.

This is a fucking game changer.

Game changer?

Wait…

My autism, and all the resources that can help me… they were… !

Learning that not being good at reaching out to friends but still considering them friends even if you don’t get in touch for years is an autistic thing.

It’s wild how much of my personality can just get filed into this one box.

Also makes me feel bad for allistic people tbh, thinking someone isn’t your friend just because they haven’t spoken to you must really suck.

But also I guess if you’re reaching out to friends all the time maybe it’s not an issue? Seems like one of those cases where some neurotypes work well together but others have a bunch of incompatible kinds of communication.

Definitely aspects of my experience I don’t like too though of course. I have a regular group chat with some friends every week, I love it. But if everyone else stopped I doubt I’d try to bring everyone back together even though it would make me happy to keep seeing them. There’s no logic to it but it’s how I’d be, I rely on others to be social. Which is a problem when I’m super particular about what social stuff I am okay with.

This is probably also why all the D&D games I’ve run fail, when the party misses a couple of weeks I don’t have it in me to arrange a new session.

tbh I enjoy being a player more anyway, so I guess that’s fine.

btw if you’re looking for someone to join your online group… 🙋

I’m just going to say it: I love my autism.

So glad I got all those vaccinations as a kid.

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(The second line is a joke, though I am glad for that for unrelated reasons!)

Ooooooh, so “scripting” is the name for the garden of dialogue trees I keep in my mind for various situations.

tbh it’s super illogical for me to keep such a thing because like every conversation goes into unplanned territory after a couple of branches, and then I’m back to “shit fuck think of what to say and how to say it and then find the right time to say it before the moment is lost and I lose my talk buffer and get discussion lag.”

(Discussion lag is a term I just thought of but wow I wish I had it sooner, so you can have it if you like. It’s for everyone who deals with a conversation moving on before they have time to process it and add input ❤️)

Walked into a supermarket for the first time since lowering my dissociation with my body and almost died.

Okay that is an exaggeration, but it was definitely some kind of fucking assault. Holy shit. Did they design these things to overwhelm literally every sense?

YouTube recommended this to me (presumably because I’ve watched hbomberguy before and will now watch anything with ‘autism’ in the title).

Anyway it’s a really good video that has nothing to do with autism, but does highlight the foundation of the anti-vax movement and WOW I had no idea that it was such a shitshow!

https://youtu.be/8BIcAZxFfrc

People erroneously say that autistic people can’t feel empathy, which is fucking staggering when you look at the behaviour of Wakefield et al.

Like, it’s not easy to highlight a real person that is unambiguously evil but that right there is a one. If getting vaccinated did shift your brain to be unlike his, then that alone is reason enough to take every single shot possible.

So something I’ve been thinking about lately is autism as a disability, which I’m sure is a topic with no shortage of controversies and I’m still figuring out where it sits with me and where I sit with it, if that makes sense.

Since I began research I’ve been skimming stuff around the social model of disability and it makes A LOT of sense to me…

I don’t think I’ve felt like being autistic has disabled me at all. Maybe, ever? Any time I think of personal struggles involving it, I was disabled because of autism, not *by* it. For example, going to the supermarket today; I theoretically am completely able to go there and get what I need, but what made it difficult was the crowd, the lights, the clutter, the sounds, etc. The obstacles came from without, not within.

If it was normal that to walk in to the supermarket you had to solve a sudoku problem I’d not have any issues, but that would severely reduce the effective ability of many others. That’s the essence of the social model of disability as far as I can tell, that society disables.

But also that doesn’t feel *completely* right, because when I have a tic attack, I do feel like it is disabling me. I can’t do what I want, I can’t exist as myself. The tics (unprompted) disable me.

And I know that autism can be like that for some people (and might even be indirectly like that for me, if it is related to my tics or [other issues I’m not ready to look at rn]), it’s a wiiiiiide spectrum after all.

Realising I am autistic has been so liberating for me, but I know it can also be a struggle for people in ways that aren’t just social (but could be improved with social change!), and balancing those two perspectives is… interesting.

A common tendency among autistic people (and everyone else too, by my observation) is to fall for dichotomous thinking, to categorise things in black and white, right and wrong, correct and incorrect.

At first, through this lens, it seems like autism as a disability, autism as wonderful and flawless, the social model of disability - it seems these things can’t all be right… but I think they are. Stuff is just more nuanced and also, out of my experience and learning so far.

Which is all to say: I am autistic, but I’m not comfortable calling my autism a disability personally. But I fully respect those who consider their own autism to be a disability or disabling.

And I think importantly: I can still see the ableism that effects people with autism, myself included. A lot of it has hurt me and disabled me, more than my autism ever did. I’ll fight that when I can, regardless of whether I consider my own autism a disability. ❤️💪

(These posts are 1000000% NOT licence for anyone to say autism isn’t a disability. Again, this is *my* thread about *my* thoughts and experiences with and about autism.)

Saw this in a compilation and it was so good I had to track down the original to link it https://vm.tiktok.com/ZGJuaJXeK/

Was thinking about how any time I anthropomorphise something, there is no going back and I will care about it’s feelings forever (sometimes I worry that the moon gets lonely all far away and that everyone forgets to talk to her, so whenever I see her I always say hi.)

Anyway I checked and yep this kind of thing is common with the tism.

Now that I think about it I identify with the moon a lot. She keeps her distance, is pretty unusual for a moon, formed in a traumatic situation, observes everything but doesn’t get involved, avoids being touched (and probably didn’t like it when it happened), and is PALE AS FUCK.

… daydreaming is a kind of stim 🤯

Looks like this notion is a little (tho only a little) controversial and not properly researched, but I have noticed since stimming more frequently in meatspace I’ve been dipping into immersive daydreams MUCH less.

I’m pretty confident it’s true though!

(Not that I’d trust research on daydreams tho tbh, rn it is mostly about “maladaptive daydreaming” which as a concept is fucking bullshit and I’ve talked about it before too much anyway, which is why I’ll say “immersive” rather than “maladaptive” - same reason I’ll call autism a condition and not a disorder.)

Anyway so yesterday when I went to the supermarket, I picked up some cheap ANC headphones (£35, which is a lot, but cheaper than most ANC. I was expecting them to be meh at best, but they are my new favourite thing. They have a button I can press and 95% of background noise just disappears. I don’t even have to play sound through them. Plus, rare thing for headphones but they fit around my ears comfortably!

Only downside I’ve found so far is they don’t cancel my tinnitus lol, which is more noticeable when everything else is gone, but since the tinnitus itself comes and goes it’s not too bad, I can just play music and/or rain sounds when I need to hear something else.

In a few autism (well, AuDHD mostly) tiktoks the mostly clean clothes pile is mentioned like it isn't an everyone thing... that can't be right...

wtf do neurotypical people do with clothes they only wear for a chill couple of hours???? Anywhere but the mostly clean pile would be absurd!

Overheard while visiting family "oh I must be tired, my words won't come."

and I'm like 👀