[This post was commissioned by one of my patrons, Geoff.]
I stim more now than I did when I was diagnosed, and much more than I did when I was fifteen. I sway, I rock, I flap, I jiggle my leg, I pace, I make satisfying patterns with my fingers. What’s more, some of my autistic body language is clearly copied from other autistic people. I took up flapping when I met an autistic friend who flapped.
It is easy, I think, to assume that you are faking your autism, if these things are true of you. Perhaps you are an autismtrender, or a fake self-diagnoser who is just doing it for attention.
I suggest an alternate explanation. Whether or not they were diagnosed with autism, all autistic people experience a process of normalization. For people who are diagnosed, it’s an explicitly medical process: quiet hands, M&Ms for not stimming, therapeutic and educational goals to extinguish the way our bodies naturally move.
For people who are not diagnosed, the normalization process is subtler, but no less real. I still remember making soothing patterns with my fingers when my father asked, in a tone of disgust, “why are you doing those weird things with your fingers?” and mockingly imitated the way I held them together and separated them. I learned not to make patterns, not to shake my foot when I’m thinking, not to rock or sway when I’m overloaded, not to flap when I experience joy.
Those of us who self-diagnosed with autism or were professionally diagnosed as adults are often those for whom this subtle process of normalization worked best. We are the most dissociated from our natural body language. The research suggests this experience is particularly common among cis female autistic people (and probably, albeit more complicatedly, among transgender autistic people as well).
Being able to pass as nonautistic is an important skill. We live in a world full of people who hate autistic people. Other people find the natural way our bodies move to be upsetting or repulsive to look at. It is not realistic to expect nonautistic people to change, so those of us who can acquire the skill of passing will often be better able to achieve our goals if we can pass.
But the process of normalization, I think, cuts us away from ourselves to some degree. It’s hard to throw myself into experiences, to enter a state of flow, when I’m constantly monitoring myself to see whether the way I move is sufficiently normal. Trying to look at my body the way other people look at it creates anxiety. I don’t have access to the ways of self-soothing that are most natural to me. And creating the beautiful patterns with my fingers is a source of joy.
So I have made, since my diagnosis, an effort to return to the natural way my body moves. And because I have been cut off from it so completely, it sometimes requires looking at other autistic people. Perhaps toe-walking will feel natural and right. Some typically autistic gestures I try do not, and I abandon them; I don’t get anything out of spinning, although I’m glad you guys enjoy it.
Rather than being inauthentic, I think, this is a way of becoming authentic, when we’re raised in a society that cuts us off from ourselves.
Thing of Things 
Alternative partial explanation:
Especially among autistic AFAB people, it’s common to seek out diagnosis as an adult after experiencing a “burnout” or “regression”—an intensification of symptoms prompted by prolonged stress. It would be surprising to me if this didn’t correlate with an uptick in stimming.
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Yeah, since moving to the Bay I’ve felt a lot more free to bounce and flap and make weird mouth noises. I’m fairly convinced that suppressing my natural expressions of happiness were a contributing factor to me being depressed back in Iowa, where I was surrounded by normies.
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A thing I frequently did as a child is running back and forth or in circles in an empty room (I could happily do this for long periods of time, just lost in thought), and having a room large enough to do this in where I could be alone was important to me, because even at an early age I knew that it looked weird. As an adult I’ve been mostly able to sublimate this into more socially acceptable forms of exercise, but it took time and effort. And there are countless other examples of stuff like that.
With few exceptions, I can only be around other people for a few hours at a time without getting mental fatigue, because it requires constant self-monitoring.
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I don’t naturally flap with open hands, but I do a very similar motion with my fists. I don’t remember ever being told to stop, but somehow I did pick up the idea that doing this is incredibly shameful, and I shouldn’t let anyone know that I do it. So while I still do this fist-flapping when alone, whenever someone walks in, I immediately stop and feel horrible shame. So now I’m taking deliberate steps to stop myself from stopping myself, and it feels super unnatural, even though I know for sure that this is what I do when not watched.
But I also noticed another pattern: once I say “out loud” that I have a certain need, it becomes *much* more pronounced. The mind state that I would now call “nonverbal”, in which I would not attempt to force myself to speak unless it’s an emergency, used to be “well, it is incredibly difficult and almost painful to speak, but obviously people don’t suddenly lose the ability to speak, so neither should I, so I will continue forcing myself.” Likewise, what I now call “social overload”, in which I would go sit in the corner, used to be “well, I’m super pissed off at everyone for no reason, and social interaction gives me no pleasure at all, but it would be rude to not participate, so I will do exactly that.” Part of it is realizing just how shitty I felt all along, but part of it seems to be that once I name the trait it does feel like it becomes stronger. From the outside, it also looks like I’m picking up the trend.
And then there is the issue that at least in speech, “monkeying other people all the time” just seems to be my natural behavior, and I can’t stop it as much as I try. It wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to assume that something similar can be happening with body language.
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Thank you so much for writing this! I’ve noticed that I’ve been flapping far more in just the past few months and it somehow had a distinct feeling of something I was almost deliberately picking up from other autistic people (and in significant part from written descriptions of flapping, I’ve interacted IRL with a person who flaps like once in the past few months, when my sister visited for christmas) and had been wondering similar things.
My mental model of you (and TUOC/a couple others) had come to fairly similar conclusions, but it’s still really nice to see someone else discussing it like this.
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I like the main gist of this, but hanging it onto the generally destructive concept of “authenticity” seems like a really bad move.
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Yeah, I have never found “authenticity” to be a very coherent concept. I am less concerned with whether something is authentic and more concerned with whether something works. If flapping your hands helps relieve stress, I don’t think it matters whether it’s a learned behavior or something that you would’ve done naturally in the absence of it being stigmatized.
I guess because I’m allergic to labels and identity stuff in general, I’m not that interested in finding out whether I’m “really” autistic. That feels like a semantic question, and it would probably depend mostly on which therapist I went to, anyway. Which is not to say there aren’t real neurological differences between different people, but where and how we drawn those lines and define those categories will always be subjective.
A lot of people seem to have these existential crises over whether they’re “really” autistic or “really” trans or “really” gay…and I just kind of find that to be a strange thing to worry about. I recognize that labels matter when it comes to communication or interacting with the world, so “what should I call myself?” is a relevant question from that standpoint, but on a more personal level? Like…what does it even mean to be “really” X as opposed to a “fake” X? Just figure out what feels good to you and do it.
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Labels make communication much easier. For example, some labels in your comment are:
– authentic
– stress
– hands
– learned
– question
– neurological
– people
Imagine having to write your comment without using these labels.
The difficulty with labels is that there is always a conflict between the detail we read into a label (that makes it more useful) and the applicability to many cases. Describing an object as a ‘table’ gives way more information than describing it as an ‘object,’ yet the former can deceive people if we are referring to a table with 3 legs, but the other person interprets the label as referring to a four-legged object.
Of course, we could merely refer to it as an ‘object,’ but that transmits very little information. A ‘three-legged’ table may be better.
However, the adjectives or descriptions that are helpful differ by audience. If the other person already included three-legged objects in their interpretation, then my adjective is superfluous. If the other person is an alien who doesn’t use tables, the adjective is probably insufficient to describe the object.
—
Now, a benefit of self-labeling is that it allows us to interpret our experiences within a helpful framework, based on experiences of those who are similar. For example, if I’m a generic human, I might be confused how other people seem much more capable at certain tasks than me.
However, if I recognize that the label ‘colorblind’ fits me, I may then understand my disability better, may copy the solutions that other colorblind people use and can communicate my disability relatively easily to others.
Lots of people have difficulty interpreting their feelings, desires and needs.
For example, if their sexual preference is merely one piece of a puzzle that results in pleasant sex or a pleasant relationship, having sex with their most preferred gender can still be very dissatisfying in most cases. Then it can be hard to know whether they were dissatisfied because of the gender of the other person, or because they were the wrong specimen of their gender.
Figuring out whether what gender they prefer can then help narrow down the search, so they only have to date people of that gender until they find an acceptable partner.
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I did say “I recognize that labels matter when it comes to communication or interacting with the world.” I’m talking more about how people process these things internally.
To use your colorblindness example, let’s say someone can’t see the full range of colors most people can but are able to perceive some colors (maybe they just can’t see blues and yellows, or whatever). In some circumstances they might call themselves colorblind in order to explain why they can’t see the letters on a sign, or whatever, but how productive would it be for this person to spend a lot of time worrying about whether they’re “really” colorblind or whether their colorblindness was authentic enough for them to use the label when they’re talking about themselves? If there’s some uncertainty about what the definition of “colorblind” is, it seems more useful to just say “yeah I can’t see some shades of blue and yellow” and leave it at that.
And sure, it helps to know which gender you’re generally attracted to, but if a man who’s usually attracted to men suddenly finds himself attracted to a woman, I don’t know if it’s that useful for him to suddenly start worrying, “oh no, I thought I was gay but what if I’m not really gay? Am I bi? Should I call myself bi? Am I being dishonest with myself if I still call myself gay? What if I was faking my gayness all along?!” You can recognize patterns and also recognize breaks from the pattern without necessarily needing to label it at all.
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True, although many people care a lot about conforming. This is a very useful trait for actually being accepted.
Our community has many people with a low tendency to conform and they often have trouble being accepted by others.
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Thank you! This describes/clarifies my experience with both autistic behavior and femininity. It often feels like I’m unlearning the suppression rather than learning the behavior, but the need to work at it has made me worry that it’s less than legitimate. This helped.
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I just want to say autism and ADHD are weirdly similar and I am not even sure if they are different things. What you call stimming is what an ADHD therapist would simply call hyperactive fidgeting, that leg-jiggling being an outlet for the excess energy. The autist specializes in narrow hobbies, the ADHDer “hyperfocuses”. The autist finds normies boring, the ADHDer finds mostly everything boring, understimulating. The ADHDr misplaces the car keys, pretty sure the autist tends to do things like that too. Autism very much sounds like ADHD with added social dysfunctions, which later might entirely be simply due to a lack of social experience. ADHD makes perfect sense, it is the executive, behavior regulation part of the brain underfunctioning, which is why they actually get calmed by stimulants, and this underfunctioning subjectively feels like being a boring, unstimulating world so one jumps at any tiny chance of finding something interesting. Forgetfulness comes from forgetting things one finds boring. Autism is something nobody really understands, what links the various symptoms together. Is the spectrum even real? That is, does the serious autist chewing the furniture have a larger dose of the same exact thing as the somewhat awkward computer programmer? How did they even prove that? I think saying that light cases of autism (employable, able to have romantic relationships) might more like be a form of ADHD could be just as defensible.
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ADHD is commonly comorbid with Autism – there can be an overlap, thus Autism is described as a ‘spectrum’ disorder.
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I applaud you. I have ASD and if you mask you are being a fraud to yourself and others. There are circumstances where one may feel compelled, pressured, necessary to stop particular behaviors, but none of that is helping change awareness. No one tells a gay person to act less ‘gay’. People have come (albeit slowly) to accept sexual orientation. Masking your self, is never going to help the conversation and awareness of neurodiversity… in my opinion. Thanks
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Successful activism requires a special kind of person: someone with privileges* out the wazoo except for the one trait they want to normalize. Even then it can be very dangerous if one misjudges the Overton window. See Oscar Wilde, whose imprisonment for buggery caused great health problems, causing him to die soon after release.
ASD in particular is a hard thing to normalize right now, given its predominantly (white) male nature. With the current vilification of men, as well as tech, not in the least by those who ought to care about the neurodiverse, there is little room for acceptance. In so far that acceptance exists, it tends to be very much because others want things from ASD people. See how Greta Thunberg gets used as a convenient weapon against the outgroup, where signs of distress get cheered on or ignored by her ‘allies’.
Ultimately, my first priority is my own well-being, not the ‘conversation.’
* Not in the least the privileges that people tend to ignore or see as disprivilege.
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