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Question:
Why do some neurotypicals stim? Do they realize they are stimming?
They do. I don’t think they know they do, but they do. […]
Watch people overcome with emotion, an emotion that they can’t process, and they will stim.
Watch the news after a disaster or some horrible accident and you will see people holding their heads and rocking back in forth in grief.
Watch game shows when someone wins a big prize and look at their hands. Fingers extended, flat palms and shaking very fast in excitement.
Once you key into it, it is hard to miss.
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Kids love repetitive stuff. I used to work as a teacher assistant with 1-4th grade. Trust me with younger kids, if they like a video, they’ll see it 200 times in a row without getting bored.
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I know many adults without disabilities that enjoy child-like things like cartoons or toys. People with Intellectual and developmental disabilities are treated differently for liking the same things. It’s funny when I meet with non disabled people and they geek out over my little plushy wookies I carry as comfort items. It shows me that adults can enjoy things that children enjoy without people assuming that they are mental children.
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The sheer amount of people who look at me and view me as ‘unresponsive’ when I’m very responsive, is impressive. And the things they do when they view me as unresponsive, seem a lot more like unresponsiveness than anything I do to them.
It’s like they only see a tiny, tiny number of the possible human responses as ‘response’. When those responses are present, even if totally fake and out of context and plastered-on to someone who’s really not all that responsive to someone, they view it as ‘responsiveness’. When those responses are not present, even if every other possible signal of response is happening, they view that as ‘unresponsiveness’. And they call us oblivious?
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I definitely know that lots of non-ASD people are terrible at judging how people with ASD are feeling.
If you just noodle around the Internet for a minute, you will find quite a lot of ASD people describing how someone thought they were nervous or sad when they were calm, bored when they were having a panic attack, uninterested in things they were actually very interested in, and so on.
In fact, sometimes police officers will harass or physically hurt people with ASD because they misinterpreted the person’s behavior.
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Hacking emphasizes that the divide between autists and non-autists is ‘symmetric.’ He attributes this divide to the fact that autistic people cannot intuit non-autists’ feelings and intentions, and vice-versa. “We are fellow humans in that we grasp each other’s intentions, feelings, and wants,” he argues. Because autists and non-autists cannot immediately grasp each other’s interiority, they see each other as alien. They do not share the “bedrock” of a common humanity, nor do they “share a form of life,” Hacking claims, borrowing two turns of phrase from Wittgenstein.
Hacking does ultimately try to gesture toward inclusion, and I do think that is laudable. However, I disagree with many of the premises of his argument, and I wholeheartedly reject the idea that autists and non-autists must be fundamentally alien to each other.
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(Why repeat lyrics?)
Seven time seven is 49. The pearl is in the river. Mr. Turkey is two times good for you. How much wood would a woodchuck chuck? I believe Fielding Melish is a traitor to his country. Badadada. Badadada.
Along with many many other stock phrases, these are integral parts of my thought process. Sometimes I say them out loud around people I am comfortable with. Each one indicates a type of thought and keeps me anchored enough in language to figure out what it is I need to say.
I suspect that NTs do this somewhat with songs, though they don’t usually respect or recognize these other forms. […]
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when I am feeling very bad, usually I’ll latch onto some song extra hard.
Is she NT? I don’t know. Should it matter? It’s up to you.
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[…] folks will often assume the speech is meaningless if they know the speaker is autistic and they recognize that it’s an echo/reference. (As opposed to neurotypicals apparently being clever when they make references?)
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Words are but the vague shadows of the volumes we mean. Little audible links, they are, chaining together great inaudible feelings and purposes.
Autism: Explorations 
