I just realised that I didn't touch on stimming aside from at the top part where I described a few behaviours in myself.
So there's a lot of be said about repetitive physical behaviours, generally known as stimming, (and my comment above doesn't have room in the character limit for me to edit this part into it 😬) and the distinction between autistic stimming and allistic (non-autistic) stimming is actually surprisingly blurry - stimming kinda problematises and stigmatises autistic self-stimulatory behaviour when just about anyone is going to rub or apply pressure to a bruise when they get hit, they're going to move their body to a rhythm, they're going to sing or whistle or hum.
In autistic people, stimming behaviour is much more common and sustained - an allistic person might whistle to themselves every now and then but an autistic person may hum a lot of the day every day, for example.
There's also so many different ways that stimming manifests that it's almost impossible to list in a comment. I can go into more depth on this in a reply if anyone's interested but know that this offer also comes with a serious mucho texto warning.
I also forgot to mention that the above comment is focused on describing autism from the perspective of internal experience over external observations because it's easy enough to find the info about the external observations but imo this is significantly lacking in dimension and it's much less useful for late self-identifying autistic people in particular.
I just realised that I didn't touch on stimming aside from at the top part where I described a few behaviours in myself.
So there's a lot of be said about repetitive physical behaviours, generally known as stimming, (and my comment above doesn't have room in the character limit for me to edit this part into it 😬) and the distinction between autistic stimming and allistic (non-autistic) stimming is actually surprisingly blurry - stimming kinda problematises and stigmatises autistic self-stimulatory behaviour when just about anyone is going to rub or apply pressure to a bruise when they get hit, they're going to move their body to a rhythm, they're going to sing or whistle or hum.
In autistic people, stimming behaviour is much more common and sustained - an allistic person might whistle to themselves every now and then but an autistic person may hum a lot of the day every day, for example.
There's also so many different ways that stimming manifests that it's almost impossible to list in a comment. I can go into more depth on this in a reply if anyone's interested but know that this offer also comes with a serious mucho texto warning.
I also forgot to mention that the above comment is focused on describing autism from the perspective of internal experience over external observations because it's easy enough to find the info about the external observations but imo this is significantly lacking in dimension and it's much less useful for late self-identifying autistic people in particular.