Autism: Why I Stopped Talking To Myself
I think back to an incident that happened when I was at school
I like to talk to myself.
But I don’t just like to do it. Talking to myself is much more than something enjoyable. It is something of a psychological necessity.
I engage in an autistic self-regulatory behaviour known as stimming, and my particular stims are phrases that I repeat to myself.
It is something that helps me relax. It helps squeeze out tension from my body, kind of like a massage for the soul.
Most of my stims are silly phrases. They’re both nonsense and meaningful because most of them are connected somehow to the people in my life who are closest to me.
But stimming is something I generally avoid doing in public, and I stopped doing so a long time ago.
The reason is that if you talk to yourself, in public, most people will think you’re a weirdo — especially given the silly nature of many of my stims.
Or at least this is the case for my best and most relaxing stims. There are some that I can get away with saying in public without people thinking I’m a weirdo.
But most of my stims I suppress. As I suppress them tension increases in my body. It is a form of…
