Let's talk about STIMMING

A moment of lived experience with Autism and COVID vaccination.

Two stories: Autism and COVID vaccination

Links for two articles referenced in the reprinted newsletter article below.

Stimming 101 or How I learned to stop worrying and love the stim

The Dark of Stimming Self-injury and destructive habits

RantWoman experience points, including stuff RantWoman always gets to think about before she fully interacts with the content. RantWoman offers these essential realities of her life offered unapologetically. If these details make other Friends' as well as members of the famous Care and Accountability Committee eyes glaze over, RantWoman invites readers to skip to the next heading.

--The Home page The Artism Spectrum looks like it has a lot of useful information.

--The site behaves well with RantWoman's screen reader EXCEPT for the ads which just sound realy stupid when read through RantWoman's screen reader.

--Has RantWoman mentioned that, as with apps, every time RantWoman touches a website she gets to fret about possible gaps in accessibility?

The Newsletter article (reproduced with some typographical lacunae RantWoman may or may not manage to redact.)

Let’s talk about stimming!

Mackenzie Barton-Rowledge

“Stimming” is short for “self-stimulating.” Everyone stims to  some extent, whether that’s bouncing your leg when sitting, twirling your hair, biting your nails or clicking a pen’s button  more times than necessary.

Neurotypicals—that is, people with “typical” brains—are the definition for “normal” stimming, but the beauty of neurodiversity means that there are many people who stim  much more than the average neurotypical. Autism is the neurological set-up most commonly associated with stimming, but it’s not the only one. People all over the neurodiversity spectrum may use stimming to self-regulate, to focus or to express themselves (like, squealing with joy).

In response to the UFM disability survey, someone asked if we could learn about stimming. So I want to share this pair of articles that I really enjoyed:

Stimming 101, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Stim

The Dark Side of the Stim: Self-injury and Destructive Habits

Both are written by Kirsten Lindsmith, an autistic artist, writer, software  developer and autism advocate.of anxiety, of anything), is  something that everyone has felt at some time or another is something that everyone has felt at some time or another.

Autistics are easily overloaded, and simply need to release tension more frequently. When I stim, I often feel like an old fashioned boiler letting off pressure—sometimes in tiny bursts, sometimes in huge belches of steam. Sometimes stimming releases pressure—especially the  good kind of stimming. Sometimes a stim will help us focus to block out invasive and overwhelming sensory input, becoming an essential coping aide.

It’s a type of self-soothing, whether one needs to be soothed because something is just too cute or because that ambulance siren is just way too loud, the root cause is essentially the same.

In my opinion, the question shouldn’t be why autistic  people stim, it should be why do autistic people stim in such a specific way. Not every autistic stims, and not every autistic person shares all the typically autistic stims. I’m a finger waver, but I’m not often a hand flapper. I have a vast number of vocal stims, but I’m not usually a rocker or a bobber. I know hair-twirlers who rock back and forth.  I know knuckle-crackers and foot-tappers who don’t wave fingers or flap hands. Every autistic is as unique as her  own personal stimming lexicon.” (Emphasis and links in original)

In our society, disabled folks are often intentionally and explicitly separated from neurotypicals—special education is a prime example. One result of this segregation is that those of us who are (or who could pass as) neurotypical often have not  been exposed to the full spectrum of neurodiversity, including the many ways people self-regulate by stimming. Teasing and reprimands push people to repress “excessive” stims as much as we can, decreasing the natural diversity of ways of being that seem “normal” to society. So anything beyond neurotypical stimming may make people uncomfortable.

Usually ignorance and ableist prejudice is the problem, not the stim itself. While there are a handful of unhealthy stims, which Kirsten talks about in the second article, most stims are entirely  harmless. But stims can be alarming if you’re not used to them! If someone starts flapping their arms or moaning repetitively, you might wonder if they’re in crisis, on drugs or detached from reality. You might feel afraid, because if one  Kirsten describes stims as “essential self-calming behaviors.”

She says that one of the most common questions she gets is “why do autistic people stim?” Her answer: The build up of emotion, the need to release emotional or physical tension due to an overload (of cuteness, of type of “normal” behavior has been thrown out the window, who can predict what that person will do next? But stimming is a normal and healthy tool for many people. On the contrary, suppressing stims may lead to meltdowns or outbursts.

Being interpreted as threatening just for having a sensitive nervous system can have deadly consequences. Elijah McClain was Black, autistic and 23 years old when he was murdered by police after someone called 911 because he was “waving his arms,” a common stim. Leroy Moore, a disabled Black educator and advocate, estimates that approximately 70% of those killed by police are disabled.

It is long past time for neurotypicals to broaden our understanding and acceptance of neurodiversity. These two articles offer a starting point for understanding stimming—and some tricks to manage self-harm! I hope you will enjoy learning from them as much as I did.

RantWoman commentary:

--RantWoman thinks reading the voices of people with disabilities in their own words is really important and RantWoman does not want to discourage contributions to the newsletter. Here though, maybe RantWoman would have offered only limited quotes, would have let the links speak for themselves and maybe would have written a whole article about police shootings and people with disabilities. .

--RantWoman almost did not reprint the full article partly because RantWoman found the copyediting a little confusing. RantWoman will now stick to better copyediting of her own stuff.

--RantWoman does not know what to make of the word "enjoy." These articles are important and contain valuable details, details that definitely do not sound like fun to live with, but "enjoy" is not necessarily the first word RantWoman would use even to describe the read

Stimming and Quakerdom

1. RantWoman finds herself imagining earnest Quakers trying to speak of, say, stimming in Meeting for worship. The quakerese word for speaking of a concern about problematic behavior is "eldering." Some efforts at eldering go better than others. RantWoman can imagine a conversation going something like

Friend attempting to elder "WE don't stim / crochet / do sudoku in Meeting for worship."

Friend being eldered. "I have been listening to the NPR show 'Says You,' and you get 5 points for knowing what stimming is, but who is 'WE?' I know many people who find these and other activities very helpful in getting to a worshipful center."

(Readers curious about the subject of sudoku are invited to use the search bar on this blog. RantWoman's version of the above response might or might not include encyclopedic discussion of vision loss realities and perhaps further eldering such as "Friend, be glad you can see across the room to be bothered. And if RantWoman doing sudoku in Meeting for worship is the worst problem of your day, say a prayer of gratitude about that too!")

2.RantWoman finds the second article really helpful both in terms of an individual autistic person's issues and in terms of spiritual accompaniment for any parent, spouse or caregiver. RantWoman finds it helpful when a member of a specific community can say "this is too much" with love and tenderness.

3. RantWoman highly recommends Musings of a Quaker Witch for one thing because there are 4 really frank articles about disability highlighted in a box on the right hand side of the page.

RantWoman is curious, where will Friends be led next?