More thoughts on stimming

So much of the debate about stimming comes from external sources and has a lot to do with external concerns - "will my kid be rejected if he stims in public?" or "she's not being productive!" ASD advocates will reply back that stimming is calming, feels good, and is a part of essential behavior for most on the ASD spectrum.

This post isn't talking about that. I'm here to discuss my personal thoughts and pros and cons about *my* stimming.

It's kind of like a self-filing system. Input comes in. Unless that input is either - a) remarkably simple or b) more complicated, but in the right setting with few distractions - it gets bounced off my deeper thought processes OR I run it through one my decoding mechanisms.

There's the shallow, more socially accepted method of simply stepping back for a moment and removing the distractions. I'll often talk aloud (very softly) as my brain converts the data it has received into a visual. Then I can understand it well enough to begin work on it, or think of a first response.

Deeper understanding of more complex issues (particularly emotional responses) usually requires a different level of processing - stimming. I hide away, and think as I pace or flap/twist/rub my hands. I'm realizing now that it's hard to actually pick out what I do physically as I stim (unless I am jarred out of it by something) because I am completely unaware of myself physically as I do this. My mind becomes completely absorbed in whatever problem I'm working out.

Stimming has its serious drawbacks and limitations. First of all, it's hard to react in real time, and that's a skill I slowly need to acquire. Second, it requires private space. But most importantly, it has the side effect of spiraling emotional problems into something that I feel profoundly and often physically. When this happens, there's often a feedback loop that gets fostered, because I interact with the world more "autistically" when I feel physically drained. Hearing becomes more sensitive, auditory communication becomes harder to internalize, and I feel even more sensitive than I am.

My body also tends to become tighter when I stim, even if I don't feel it in the moment. My muscles twitch and seize up. As a result, I'm rather inflexible, and feel like I have more chronic pain than I should at my age. Doing yoga has been combatting this lately. The effects are almost immediate and amazing.

I cannot picture living without stimmming. It's an essential part to feeling connected into myself and the broader world in turn. I'm just trying to find strategies to cope with the aftereffects in a more healthy manner.

Thoughts from a calmer place

In the grand checklist of my current state of affairs, I've managed to cross off a few rows this year.
I got myself into one steady, reliable, low-customer contact job in an environment that is both beautiful and orderly. It pays well enough to sustain me without other work, and I don't mind going there at all. Part of my job is unpacking and putting away dutifully wrapped objects in little rows. One of the customer service reps unpacked one box the other day, and said, "this is tedious! How do you do this all day?" I just smiled and said, "there's a certain zen about it." Not only the rows and the routines, but watching big piles become small ones like a checklist. My stock room will be pristine.

I have a plan for debt management - I'm going to erase it and start anew. The economy is in a holding pattern right now, so I plan to hunker down and stay where I am and not rely upon my credit to get me anything, and wait for it to slowly fix itself. Perhaps I'll have some money to spend by the time anybody wants to lend me anything!

I have not moved anywhere on the topic of love, but I can understand it all more without feeling so emotionally intertwined. I have met the person I would marry, but he is already committed. We are poly, so there is a small part of him I can have. For years, this seemed like a cosmic rebuke - an injustice so deep that I couldn't fathom a benevolent force in the universe that would allow this situation to happen. But of course, the world is filled with far more violent injustices than this, and is also filled with dedicated, patient people imbued with a similar romantic sensitivity who have won love at the end of the day.
I cannot provide for him, and while that does not indicate that he is weak or needs providing for, the fact is that I cannot give him the life he needs right now. He is with someone loving and whom he loves deeply, who also has the ability and dedication to provide him with a setup that allows him to make the most of his talents. I cannot give him this, so all the better that he is not with me, resentful or yearning or wasting his time away on sustenance.

So, onward, with an open mind and heart.

Management and job prospects

I was reading an aspie blog on jobs recently, and how management is *not* recommended as a choice for aspies. It recommends staying in a technical position, lest you burn out.

I made a similar decision in my life. I had worked at a giant coffee chain for years - i started as a barista, and moved up to a supervisor position because i was hard working and because I couldn't stand incompetent people telling me how to do my job or encouraging me to cut a lot of unnecessary corners. Moving up also meant that I had more control over whether i got to do background tasks or interact with customers all day - for the same reason, early on, i got really good at cleaning tasks and working the bar.

i moved to a new state and stayed with my company, and they wanted to move me up to management. as an assistant manager, i had my first panic moments. after a rough summer where several of my staff had bad interactions with customers (being stalked, being yelled at, etc.) a guy came in to complain and yelled a bunch of ugly things at me, and i called the cops and had him removed. my boss thought i had not done enough to appease him. all i knew is that someone was in my store and screaming at me, and i considered it good enough that i didn't run away or start screaming back, particularly when the insults got personal.

fast forward - i was meticulous and the staff liked that i was willing to work hard despite being a manager and that i treated people fairly. i didn't tolerate the social drama that other managers fostered. i knew all of my facts and learned quickly. i was already uncertain by this point, but i got my own store to run.

my intentions were good, and my new staff grew to love me for being fair and for advocating for them. but i was always really bad at disciplining people who needed it, and i found it hard to cope when i wasn't sure someone was lying to me. my boss really knew how to get under my skin and emotionally manipulate me - i felt really fragile, and i felt like she exploited that to shame me into doing well more than i needed to do. i spent 55-60 hours a week at my store to try to get things done right. i was constantly on call, and my precious downtime was never fully mine.

so when i decided to move, i realized that i didn't want to continue to be a manager. i decided that entry level positions would be good for me while i went back to school and pursued a career where i could actually be creative and work alone sometimes. of course, lots of entry level positions are part time, and i need to work several jobs to make the money i need, and as you can see from the last post, that's not working out so well, either.

i'm putting my love of research into a website project that i can hopefully launch into a successful business. i know that i'll need some help on the broader organizational issues, but i'm hoping that i can create something viable and not have to work outside the house so much. we'll see.

I often feel like maintaining multiple priorities is a bit like running up a treadmill continuously while juggling for me. There are moments when I am doing it, and not falling or being pushed backward, and in those moments I feel like I imagine one would in the runner's "zone" - that rare glimpse of pride and exhilaration.

Most of the time, I'm forced to drop a few balls, or get pushed back off the treadmill. I can keep running with the remaining ball in my hand, or I can try to reach down for the ones i dropped and end up falling off the treadmill.

It's usually better for me to just run with one ball, and hope that I can pick up the others later, or that someone will be kind enough to hand them to me.

When I try to maintain all the balls in the air at once, I tend to go flying off the treadmill and crash spectacularly. That is what happened to me this week.

I got really depressed. I feel a low level panic at all times. There are still pieces on the floor, and so am I. The treadmill keeps moving without me, and I know at some point I have to get back on it. But I don't want to.

No energy

I find that when I am repeatedly put into changed circumstances or new social relationships through work, school, etc., I have less energy or will for voluntary social activity.

I've been limiting my interactions with people. I notice that I've pulled in my ring of potential people to socialize with to about three people. My housemate just suggested a board game night, and I didn't really want to commit to a day or have anything to do with planning it. It all sounded like effort. Last month, I was excited to have one.

I just feel tired and drained almost all of the time now. I'm perfectly happy to sit home and while away my time on the computer or reading a book. Last night I made a trip out to Target, but with the goal of getting myself more things to make my surroundings comfortable.

And that makes me think: why did I move to a big metropolitan area where rents are higher if all I'm going to do is work and hole up in my apartment? I'm going for a walk tomorrow with one of the three inner circle friends, but I'm not meeting new people (aside from co-workers) or going to any big social engagements. I'm not quite sure if I should be fighting this, or if I just need to let my work situations play out until I reach an equilibrium.

Compounding anxiety

I managed to oversleep for my shift yesterday morning. I had set my alarm clock for the time I needed in pm instead of am, and considering I had a short morning shift, it was far too late for me to come in by the time I woke up.

I could have called in, but I was too embarrassed. I left my phone off. I checked my voicemail later on and my boss had called. I tried to hype myself up to call him back. The phone rang, and I became paralyzed with fear. What would I say? I let him leave another voicemail. It is the next day, two hours before my shift, and I still have not called.

Now I have to give him a reason for not only being late, but not calling back. At this point, I am debating calling him back as I leave for work (so that I am walking and it seems less frightening) and saying that I had left my phone at a friend's house. I hate lying, and I hate talking on the phone, but at least he won't see the obvious cues in my face.

I am still so nervous about the prospect. There were times when I missed a class in college and was so freaked out that I didn't go back the next time, or the next time, and ended up dropping out. I am the kind of person that always shows up early for work, because I hate the feeling of being late or missing work - of feeling "bad." Deviations from that norm are always hard to deal with.
There are those voices in my head that say, "You already have one job. This is just another one. You can find another second job. You'll never have to face him again." Which is just entirely unreasonable, and I know it. This is a perfectly good job, and the boss is not a hardass, and as long as I don't screw up again, I will be able to continue working there and this incident, over time, will be forgotten. I do not have the money right now to lose a source of income. I think what vexes me is that I've only been at this job for three weeks, and have not established a positive reputation yet. And therefore, this will cast a pall over me that will take a lot of time to erase. I worry that any other area of deficiency in my performance will take on added weight. There's also the fact that I am unsure about this job in general, and see it as a temporary thing until my first job gives me that full time status. (Should happen in January.) It feels too familiar to my last job, which lasted five years. And it has the same inherent issues for me - multitasking, lots of people contact, expected to be upbeat and sociable the entire time. I am more drained from a four hour shift there than I am from a 6-8 hour shift at my other job.

But I am making excuses, once again. Until I have something else lined up, I need to keep this job. And I need to find something to tell my boss about what happened yesterday and why I panicked and didn't call him back, and I need to march into that store today and work my shift.

Book Discussion

I've had a lot of library books in the house lately, and since my housemate is the one picking the books out in large part, I'm getting to read books that I would not normally be compelled to grab off the shelf.

One of these books was Blink by Malcolm Gladwell. It was all about the power of the instinctual decision.

The early part of the book was fascinating and drew the most interest. He discussed a study where the subjects had sensors attached to their hands to measure sweat and temperature changes, and then he had them play a card game involving monetary gain and loss. There were two decks, red and blue. The red deck produced big wins and big losses, and the blue deck produced mostly moderate wins. There were more losses in the red than the blue, and overall, the only way to have a net gain was to switch to using only blue cards. The study measured when the players made that realization on a subconscious and conscious level. The sensors measured tension (through sweat) when a player touched a red card only a few cards into the game! The player began to instinctually avoid those red cards about ten cards into the game, and consciously realized that the red cards were a bad bet after about 40 cards.

Then he starts to turn this interesting phenomenon into a Theory of Everything. It's hard to tell what his thesis is - he argues that instinctual judgments are valuable, and then he warns of their danger, and then he argues again that they are valuable, but only for people who are already experts. Then he says that we all have the power of instinctual judgment. I kept waiting for him to tie all of these contradictions together neatly, but that moment didn't come.

What came instead was a shoddy link to autism. He talks about face blindness and uses as his subject an autistic man who watches Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf and is lost in regards to the plot because he does not pick up the subtle facial clues the characters are providing.
Then the scientist who has studied this autistic man goes on to tell Gladwell that his patient sees no difference between people and objects. (This same doctor says, and I paraphrase because the book is back at the library, that he needs to define the world for his patient because his patient cannot define the world for himself. This patient lives independently and has several advanced degrees, so I would argue that while he may be socially impaired, he does not need his world "defined for him" in such a patronizing manner.) Gladwell seems to adopt the "no difference between people and objects" line as one of his takeaways on autism, and decides to link this dubious theory back to acts of violence under stress.

Seriously. Gladwell had spent an earlier chapter talking about the police officers that shot Amadou Diallo, and wondered why the hell the four of them collectively built up an image of a dangerous man out of a guy who was standing quietly in his doorway. It was a fascinating question. Gladwell's answer seems to be that in the tense moments leading up to the shooting, the officers developed a mind blindness and did not view Diallo objectively. Gladwell linked the physiological changes (heart rate, impaired vision, increased adrenaline) that occur under stress to being autistic. (I believe that his cute phrase was "temporary autism,"), further stressing that the officers did not see Diallo as anything more than an object. That caused them to open fire.

If that were the case, why don't we hear about autistic people going on murderous rampages when threatened? I think that the autistic response to stress would fall much more readily into "flight" than "fight." Fight is a last resort, only used to get someone in your immediate vicinity out of it. That withdrawal into stimming, although seemingly public in nature, is a way to pull the sensory world inward and reinforce that wall between the world inside of the mind and everything else outside of it.

Perhaps I'm wrong. Gladwell might do well to examine this point further, although I hope he'd let someone on the ASD spectrum consult with him on how to produce the study. (An aside - I don't remember Gladwell ever quoting the autistic patient he refers to directly, instead taking all of his quotes from the patient's doctor.) Here's my proposal - test people on the ASD spectrum and neurotypicals side by side in stress situations in a virtual reality simulation. Put them in a VR hallway with several escape routes. Give them a VR weapon. In the first run through, tell them that there is a gunman, but don't show him. Just replicate the sound of his footsteps and the distant firing of guns. See if people take the chance to escape or purposely hunt down the gunman. In the next round, make him visible. Who panics and shoots the gun, and who still chooses to run? Do another round where he is heard, but not seen. Do another round where a person appears, but they're not a gunman, they're an innocent bystander. Who shoots the elderly shopper, and who stops in time or simply runs away? In the next round, change the escape route so that in order to escape, the person has to run closer to the sounds of gunshots in order to get through the door. Who shoots, who hides, who makes it successfully through the door?