Autistic Hedgehog

I don’t see why not. Stimming seems to vary greatly from autistic to autistic. Most autistics I know talk about happy flapping, for example, but I almost never flap when happy. Usually it comes with nerves (though I’ve recently discovered that abject horror will make me flap too. I never knew that until I watched Once Upon a Time).

That your stims are related to the intensity of your mood rather than which mood is just your variation of something we all experience. 

I don’t see why not. Like you said, it’s a repetitive hand motion that relaxes you and keeps your mind off the stimuli around you. Okay, unlike many stims you could potentially make some profit off it on Etsy, but I don’t think that really disqualifies it. If it works for you, it works. 

That’s sort of a tricky question, because sometimes stims intersect with other things, and there are a lot of things that count as stims.

Simplified, a stim is a repetitive motion or action (it might be making a sound rather than moving) and it can be an expression of a number of emotions: fear, happiness, contentment, anxiety. It can also be a way to calm fear or anxiety, or to ground one’s happiness.  I don’t think a long period of repetition is necessary for something to be a stim (I sometimes make a small string of sounds along the lines of “nif nif nif” which I tend to do in stim-like situations) but over all it’s something that repeats. 

Using my own as an example:

• I rock when agitated, hurt (as in injured) or in other ways upset, though sometimes this only makes me more agitated.
• I sway (which is more rhythmic than rocking) when happy, content, tired or some mixture thereof. 
• I flap, but very little. Usually I flap my entire arms, and the motion is connected to a very particular anxiety, like when I’m asking for permission for something. 
• I rub on smooth textures (like satin ribbon) for comfort in situations where I’m anxious or want to feel extra content.
• I make small chains of sounds, like the “nif nif nif” I mentioned earlier, often as an expression of feeling good or feeling silly.

You can see there’s sort of a pattern of how those connect. There’s another thing I do that I don’t consider a stim, though. I bite the skin around my fingernails. While I do it more in times of increased anxiety, I always do it regardless, I have a tendency to hurt myself doing it, and it doesn’t really make me feel better in any way. I just can’t help it. That’s where I draw the line.

Some things are unquestionably not stims, but for the most part, you need to find your own personal guidelines for what a stim is to you. If something falls outside those guidelines, then odds are good you’re not doing it for stimming purposes. 

Autism has a range of symptoms, including the ones you’ve described, and not every autistic person has all of them. But there are also other disorders that can have very similar symptoms. 

While I’m not in any way, shape or form a doctor and maybe not the person to be giving out medical advice, it does sound like your symptoms are extreme and disruptive enough that you should talk to someone about it. Even if it’s not autism, it might be something else that you could get treatment and/or support for. It sounds bad enough that I don’t think you should write it off as social anxiety. 

You may also want to try doing some reading, checking out some blogs of autistic people here on tumblr. 

I honestly don’t know. I would venture a guess that it depends on the individual in question, but it’s not something I know much about. Though they do sound like the kind of stims that may be exacerbated by something else, like some kind of anxiety disorder. 

Well, Jay, my question for you is: Do under even understand why it makes you uncomfortable?

It’s important to understand why you feel the way you feel, even if facing it might be uncomfortable. You’ve been honest with yourself that you have this problem to begin with, which is good.

Now, do you feel this way because someone else’s stimming or meltdowns, which can be loud or distracting or numerous other things, overload your own senses? Is it because you, like everyone else, have been taught your whole life that this sort of thing is supposed to make us feel uncomfortable? (Hooray, ableism.) Is it because there’s a part of you that fears that somehow anyone around you might see this person and make some sort of leap that you, too, are autistic (even if you’re not stimming or having a meltdown at the time)? Maybe it’s all of those things. Maybe it’s a combination of two of them. Maybe it’s something else. But discovering the reason will help you if you really want to change how you feel.

You’re also going to need patience and understanding, both for the other people and for yourself. This isn’t something you can change overnight, so don’t get too frustrated with yourself when you can’t stop those feelings right away. We’re often raised in societies that teach us that it’s rude to stare at people who are disabled, rude to ask questions, etc. etc., but really what we end up being taught is that it’s rude to acknowledge the existence of disabled people and, if we do, it’s rude to feel anything but discomfort and pity. We’re taught that there’s a stigma just by being near or like disabled people, and even when we’re disabled ourselves, we can’t easily escape having those lessons etched into our brains. 

This doesn’t make you a bad person, it really doesn’t. You’d be a bad person if you didn’t give a damn, but clearly you do. Now you need to accept that you’re not perfect, that you probably won’t change your feelings and get this right instantly, and that will help. 

And like I said, patience and understanding for the other person(s) involved. You know what they’re going through, you’re in a better place to empathize than anyone else. You actually understand, to some extent at the least, what drives their behavior, so you know there’s no real reason it should be so stigmatized. You know, somewhere inside you, that society is in the wrong for judging people, and part of getting over this will likely be learning not to give a damn what society thinks of you.

It’s hard to get away from what society teaches us; even when we’re autistic, a lot of those lessons burrow their way in. Shaking them off takes time, patience and acceptance, and what you need to do more than anything else is give yourself (and other people like you) all three of those. 

Stimming can help you stop a meltdown or recover from one, or may occur during one–it’s generally a repetitive movement done for comfort (though plenty of us stim out of happiness or excitement, too). Classic stims are things like rocking or flapping one’s hands, but a number of other behaviors count as well (I tend to like to rub satin ribbon).

The thing about defining a meltdown is that a) they’re not precisely the same for all of us and b) I suspect they change shape and form from childhood to adulthood.

How you meltdown depends entirely on you. You might get angry (this is common in children and is, sadly, often dismissed as tantrums), you might cry, you might scream, you might go completely numb. The most important factor and the thing that distinguishes a meltdown more than anything else, though, is this: You will not care what other people think about you while it’s happening.

This is very important for recognizing what a meltdown is to you. Me, I tend to cry (though in certain situations I cry until I get angry, at which point I often find the strength to get myself through, which is different from when I was younger) and I will sob my eyes out without noticing or caring that there are people all around me. 

In the end, a meltdown occurs when you’re so overwhelmed by something that you can’t handle it anymore, and the response is usually an outburst of emotion (but can be the complete absence of it). Knowing when you yourself are having an actual meltdown is going to take a bit of time and thought on your part. After the dust clears on a particularly emotional moment for you, look back at it. Were you somewhere others could see and didn’t care what they thought of your behavior? Even if you were alone, did it matter to you if someone saw you? Learning to recognize these things will tell you when you’re having a meltdown.