Recently I watched back a short clip of myself making a speech. Amongst the toe-curling, jaw-clenching cringe of it all, I noticed that when I speak in public I have a tendency to move about quite a bit. In this clip, I’m sort of jumping up and down on the spot. Despite knowing I was scared to speak to so many people at once, I look like I’m almost enjoying myself. Almost.

Casting my mind back over ten years ago, I remember when circumstances led me to having no choice but to take part in a public speaking training course. Predictably, I experienced panic attacks during every session. The tutors on that course would tell me off for moving around so much. ‘Keep still’, they would say, ‘your nerves are showing when you fidget and rock about like that’ So the nerves I had around public speaking where compounded by my paranoia over what my body was doing in the moment. The tutors had extremely neurotypical standards about what a ‘good’ speech should look like.

I didn’t attempt public speaking for another decade, until last year when I started my experiments in unmasking.

Stimming is necessary and beautiful.

My childhood was filled with sensory delight and the safety to stim as I pleased.

There is an old home video clip of me, filmed from the staircase in the hallway. Through the door to the front room the camera zooms in on a toddler running around in circles on a swirly-patterned carpet as ‘No Limit’ by 2 Unlimited blasts on the hi-fi.1

Running around in circles was my jam as a kid. Like Kylie, I was spinning around, move out of my way.

Everything about that video clip was stim-heaven. The running in circles. The feel of the carpet burning the soles of my feet. The loud, bassy dance music. I felt like a lemon when made to sit on dirty church hall floors oops-upside-your-heading at kids birthday parties. I much preferred the solo raves in the living room. (There is a cosmic joke that the number one song in the UK when I was born was ‘Ebeneezer Goode’). Even the feel of the speakers in our front room was wonderful. They were made of a scratchy netting and I loved running my fingers over them as music played.

When I wasn’t spinning and raving, nothing could bring me more joy as a kid than a visit to a carpet shop. One of those big ones in an out-of-town retail park called something like ‘Carpet Planet’. I would go in and behold a number of extraordinary things:

• The sight of thousands of patterns and colours. So enamoured with bright, bold colour, I chose an electric blue carpet for my bedroom that I was endlessly proud of.

• The variety of textures. I skipped up and down the many aisles of the carpet shop pressing my hand against woolly rugs, smooth linoleum, and thin rough-to-the-touch carpets I’d come to know as an adult as the ‘Landlord’s Special’.

• Most importantly, the smell of new carpet - that kind of fresh yet synthetic scent. I used to ask my mum to drive to carpet shops specifically so I could experience this. Altogether now: ♩‘Why weren’t you diagnosed until you were 29?’ ♩

I’ve written about my echolalia previously, but while writing about the stims I used to indulge in I’m reminded of the sentences I used to repeat because they sounded fun to say. I’d once heard Soo, the haughty panda from Sooty and Sweep say ‘Get out of my face and get out of my life’, so I took to saying it a lot in the exact same intonation. I had no clue what the words meant, but they sounded cool.

There was also a fascination with making a repetitive ‘tock’ sound with my tongue and the roof of my mouth. Of course, I learned this somewhat annoying behaviour from my nan, my childhood co-conspirator.

Over the past year, while I have been working on unmasking safely and comfortably, I have been looking at ways to openly stim again. At some point in my early life I was taught that stimming was wrong and weird and I suppressed it.

Nowadays, besides the jumping up and down or moving back and forth when making any kind of speech, I also empower myself to stim in other ways that come naturally to me such as:

• Listening to the same song on repeat, loud on headphones, preferably in the dark (bonus points if the song is a cool colour2)

• Blurting out random lines from old Vines and videos if I’m reminded of them in conversation. For example, recently I can’t stop saying, in Dr Phil’s Texan drawl, ‘I want you to get exciiited about your liiife!’

• Wearing soft fabrics that I can deliberately stroke and be enveloped in, particularly in moments of stress. Hello hoodies.

• Eating safe foods because it feels good to eat the plainest stuff when I feel overwhelmed.

• Rocking and fidgeting. I can’t sit still unless I am engrossed in something. I carry a tangle toy with me in my bag, and I’ve got used to having it around literally everywhere.

The best one isn’t a stim, but a mindset shift (apologies for the podcast-bro terminology).

I gave myself the permission to stim and sensory-seek. It was taken away from me when I was younger and I’ve decided to regift it to myself.

I feel happier for it, and wish the same for you.

Thank you for reading!

Take it easy,

Ren