Stimming Freely and Me
Allists tap their fingers, but autists self-stimulate (abbr., stim). Put another way, as autistic author melanie yergeau writes, being diagnosed meant that “my hand and full-body movements became self-stimulatory behaviors”. But everyone stims(!), with contemporary (but nascent) research suggesting that “autism traits” are “distributed normally” throughout the entire human population (as discussed here). Semantics aside, stimming has been “re-claimed” (read: claimed) by actual autists (e.g., #StimFreely) as a means of taking pride in our bodies. This post, then, is meant to…