Hi friends,

I am constantly scuffing my shoes at the toes. It’s baffled me for years - how was I managing to do this? Was I secretly doing ballet whilst blacking out? Or potentially sleepwalking and attempting to reach the top shelf in the kitchen for a 2am custard cream?

I don’t tend to have an awful lot of awareness about how I appear to others in a physical sense. For example, it’s only in the last few years of my life that I’ve started thinking about what my taste in clothes genuinely is (rather than thinking ‘Let’s dress as a travel agent from the 80s when going to work and buy a lot of patterned blouses because that’s what office people should look like.’).

Then by accident, one day I saw myself walking. No, it wasn’t an out of body experience. Randomly I was looking through Facebook content of a Pride event I attended a few years ago. I found a clip of a parade and remembered that I had been behind a certain section of the crowd, so I should be appearing right… about… now.

And there I was.

Bobbing up and down like my feet were two pogo sticks.

I’m clearly walking on my toes. I also looked very much like I was enjoying myself. I was never aware until that very moment that I did this. As I wasn’t aware, I wasn’t self-concious. I was simply being myself in the moment.

How had I never realised that I walk on my toes sometimes? On speaking to my mum afterwards, I discovered that this was nothing new. ‘You did that a lot as a kid.’

It was yet another thing my wavy family thought everyone else did too (see also: struggling to make friends, one-sided conversations and eating the same thing every day for weeks on end.)

Fellow autistic folks may relate - toe-walking seems to be quite a common thing for us to do naturally. That and ‘t-rexing’, which is where you walk around with your forearms raised up to your chest. I do this too.

Unlike my toe-walking, I am almost hyper-aware of my t-rexing.

There I was at primary school, in assembly, stood at the front, not really knowing how to stand when you speak in front of a big group. Afterwards, a classmate giggled “Ha! You should have seen how you were stood. You looked well weird.”

Stuck in my craw, that did. Can you tell?

I heard it quite a bit growing up.

“You’re doing that thing again.”

“Put your arms down.”

“Why do you walk like that?”

And I didn’t know because I didn’t realise I was doing it. And I didn’t really understand why other people found it peculiar.

So guess what, like a lot of the things that made me an individual, I squashed it down. Put it in a box marked ‘V Weird Don’t Do This’ and put it in the attic with my Steps posters.

I’ve been guilty of checking myself constantly. “Am I doing that thing? Put your arms down. Just act normal.”

Ah, there it is. Our old enemy - Internalised Ablism.

Often I’ve wondered if people find the t-rexing I do part of my ‘uncanniness’. Is it a part of my physical presentation that just doesn’t quite track with the ableist societal expectation? More importantly, why do I care what they think?

At home there’s safety in the sense that no one is around to raise a judgey eyebrow. I put the washing away and catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror - I’m sorting washing with one hand whilst the other is tucked to my chest. I don’t notice because it’s natural for me. It feels comfortable. That’s it. It’s not that deep.

Regular readers of this newsletter know that I’ve been on a bit of an unmasking journey over the past few years, and truly there are no environments I exist in anymore where things like t-rexing causes issues. I am lucky to be accepted wherever I find myself these days. Of course, ‘luck’, or ‘privilege’ should not come into it, should it?

Whether it’s autism or not, I don’t believe in squashing yourself down to make yourself palatable to people who might judge you negatively. They aren’t worth it. I want to live loudly. Undiluted. Fully-fledged me. Without that, I would be deeply unhappy. I don’t want a deeply unhappy life. I want a life filled with joy. Joy can only arrive through authenticity. Joy can only arrive if I stop policing the things I do naturally.

I’d like to suggest that, if we are in the position to be, we should be like the kids and start ‘t-rex maxxing’.

Take it easy,

Ren

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