As a community, us autistic people talk a lot about how stimming is productive. It doesn't matter that it is, if it was just fun, if it was just something we did because it felt good, that would be important and good and something that we should do and nobody should stop us from doing. But it also does other things. Stimming is ways we explore and understand the world. Stimming is ways we interact with things that are too much or too little or not what we expect or exactly what we expect, in order to make sense of it. Stimming is ways we process, ways we communicate, ways we express emotion, ways we make it so that everything is not too much. Stimming is productive. Stimming is necessary. Stimming is good. Everybody stims.
I do a lot of hand stimming. My hands are always moving. They run along walls, bounce off of other textures, have my fingers in motion, stereotypically flap, or do whatever that I need in the moment. It is ways that my body can understand what is going on aroud me. I don't process information well in vision, give me touch and the world makes more sense. I have really poor propioception in generally, but my fingers have learned how to move and understand where they are, because that is how I communicate. My hands move. It makes things make sense, it makes me able to make sense of it.
I have EDS. My hands are hypermobile, I might make sense of the world with my hands, but I can never make sense of my hands with themselves. When once again, they bounce off the wall to realize there's a wall there it comes with my joint sliding out of place. I need to move my hands. And, I once again hyperextend or sublux something or other, because my hands just do that too.
When my hands get too irritated and inflammed, it is hard to move them at all. The inflammation physically prevents movement. My body keeps being told this is not supposed to be like this, something is wrong, something is wrong, something is wrong, constantly. I need to move, it is the only way to get rid of the wrongness. I can't move, because my hands won't move.
Movement, whether hands or otherwise, repetitive movement, nice, organizing patterns which can put my brain in order, can help with the overwhelming wrongness of being unable to use my hands. But the same time my hands are flaring I find myself struggling to do what is otherwise simple combinations of motions. Step in pattern. Stand on one foot. Can't do can't do can't do. Even standing up from sitting am more likely to need someone to help pull me up because coordinating my body to do the steps to stand doesn't work.
How do I put my self in order when I can't move? Why can I not move I don't have any injuries to my ankles or hips this time. My body should work shouldn't it?
Go to stand, hand flutters by my side. Thinking how to do the motion, get it right. Stand up.
Eventually notice that every time I try to move, I am trying to move my hands. My hands move to understand the world. My hands move to understand my space in it.
We talk about stimming as productive. We talk about how it is used to process and understand.
For me, I move my hands, to understand how to move. I get confused, my sensory system can't coordinate with each other, I nearly fall, until my hands take their part in the motion of a step.
My hands are how I make sense of the world. That can be always true. I don't have to skip parts of it. And I can have that be part of my physical therapy. If my hands are flaring today, we need to do single muscle exercises, because I can't do anything that combines multiple muscles. My hands moving alongside is how I know how to do that.
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