Month: December 2017

Stimming 101

Another great post from strangerdarkerbetter.

So Much Stranger, So Much Darker, So Much Madder, So Much Better

What is stimming?

Stimming is self-stimulating behavior that is typically repetitive in nature.

The term stimming was coined by the autistic community to  discuss what is often referred to by professionals as “stereotypy” and described in the DSM-5 as “stereotyped or repetitive motor movements, use of objects, or speech (e.g., simple motor stereotypes, lining up toys or flipping objects, echolalia, idiosyncratic phrases).”

Uh…can you give me some examples?

Sure! Stimming includes a wide range of actions including, but not limited to, the following:

  • Hand flapping
  • Rocking
  • Foot tapping
  • Rubbing one’s face
  • Spinning
  • Finger wiggling
  • Repetitive vocalizations
  • Doodling
  • Hair twirling
  • And much more!

Why do people stim?

Lots of reasons! Most of the reasons fall under the following categories:

  • Sensory Regulation: for Autistic people and people with SPD, stimming is a way to provide sensory input to avoid understimulation as well as a way to replace or block out…

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Two things… One old year…

First thing…

At 8 o’clock this evening LH will go and join the happy band of bellringer’s to ring out the old year with muffled bells in our village church tower. The bells are then unmuffled in preparation for midnight. Muffled bells have a haunting quality about them and I love to hear them. In the meantime the ringers and partners will gather together in one of the cottages for a feast. At quarter to midnight they will return to the tower to begin joyful ringing in of the New Year at the stroke of midnight for half an hour. When ringing is complete they then celebrate with something alcoholic 🙂 They deserve it ❤

Second thing…

I love such serendipitous coincidences; it’s like God smiling on me. Its New Year’s Eve and I’ve just got my 300 th follower. What a lovely little way to end the old year 🙂

Autistic Anxiety and the Ableism of Accommodation

Ryan Boren

Autistic anxiety is a powerful presence in my life. Its intensity can be unfathomable to a neurotypical mind. I’m 44 years old and have trouble ordering food at a restaurant. I need hours to come down from the adrenaline poisoning of a one-minute phone call. I meltdown in crowds. Adrenal exhaustion is a near-permanent condition. This has been so for my whole life.

This, for me, is a disability. In a context where I’m required to talk and interact at length, I am disabled. If the internet and the web hadn’t come into being as I entered college and the workforce, I would likely have gone unemployed and ended up homeless. I didn’t expect to live to middle age. I expected to eventually defenestrate. “Written communication is the great social equalizer.”

Disability requires context. Change the context, and eliminate the disability. The internet changed the context and made…

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Being a Prisoner to Chronic Illness

Different condition but similar result. I seem to be managing my loneliness more effectively since I’ve been blogging. I have all of you to thank for that 🙂

My Brain Lesion and Me

Loneliness. Isolation. Solitude.  Three words that I would describe life with a neurological disorder, excluding words associated with the symptoms that accompany said condition.

Having experienced symptoms related to the neurological condition I live with, I have always felt like I’ve never fitted in anywhere. Like Belle, from ‘Beauty and the Beast’ I have always felt that others’ looked down on me, thinking of me as odd and different, just like the villagers in the classic Disney film. Both Belle and the Beast are outsiders in the movie, both harbouring feelings of loneliness and it is this that I have resonated with over the years and perhaps one of the reasons it remains my favourite film to this day.

what-a-puzzle-to-the-rest-of-us-is-belle

Often, I feel that I don’t fit in with my own family; a jigsaw piece that doesn’t fit in with the incomplete puzzle. Of course, I have had made friends during…

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Reblog of ‘On how power silences marginalized groups’

On how power silences marginalised groups

Great power brings the need for great responsibility.

Online, I and so many other autistic people have been watching a rich, powerful, well-connected, well publicised author trying to silence autistic voices of dissent.

The author has written a book which outlines her son’s autistic behaviours.  She describes him in ways many autistic people find humiliating, dehumanising, horrific.  I don’t use such words lightly.  It describes how the mum in question intends to seek a vasectomy for her son, currently aged 15, to stop him having children in future.  He is at school, talks, reads, has friends.  The author had described another autistic person in terms that the person found distressing.  When they complained about this, they were referred to as a brat.   It was a moment of revelation as to the author’s view of autistic adults.

When autistic people took to finding copies of the book (for a while available as a pdf online, since removed)  – or reading copies in the library… or borrowing copies from one another – they started reviewing it online.  The author didn’t like this, it seems.

The author contacted a friend of theirs on a large bookselling site and it seems asked them to censor the comments.    Then apparently asked her largely-rich, powerful group of online friends to target the autistic commentators by getting the review sites to remove their comments.

Let’s think about this for a moment.
Autistic people are amongst the more impoverished on the planet.  So many have no jobs, no spare income.  Not so much as a spare £1. Society prevents most of us from working, such is the level of misunderstanding and hate out there.

In order to comment on whether we have a right to reproduce, and whether an author has the right to name and shame their own child in that debate and publish it…we have to now be able to afford to buy a book each, it seems.  From a specific bookshop where the cheapest price seems to be £8.  And review it in ways that please the author, or her mate will remove their review.  £8….  That’s possibly two days of food, for an autistic person.  Maybe it’s a whole weeks-worth of food.

This, my friends, is power.
The power to decide who is rich enough to review you

Please read on; the full article can be read here at Ann’s Autism Blog .
Accessed Friday 29th December 2017 from http://annsautism.blogspot.co.uk/2017/12/on-how-power-silences-marginalised.html

Autscriptic: Mild Autism

This is so brilliantly written. In my own experience I don’t hear the word ‘mild’ so much as I do ‘high functioning’…

Autism and Expectations

In 2016 I wrote a post that seemed to capture people’s imagination in a way that others didn’t. Autscriptic has since been shared far and wide.

It taught me that there is great power in sharing conversations between neurotypes: Laying bare the misunderstandings that tangle us up.

The first Autscriptic was about the trials of masking, this Autscriptic is about the times when I’ve had people quantify my autism based on how well I can smile. Once again it is not me recounting any one conversation, it’s a story based on many conversations I have had. Usually with people who know little about me and less about my autism diagnosis.

You must have a mild form

Mild?

Yes

Mild and soft and gentle as a summer rain?

I suppose

What does mild mean?

Well, you’re not very… flappy. You can talk, you can look at me. I just mean you…

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