My Journey to Rediscovering My Stims

After years of being forced to mask, I am finally able to comfortably stim again. In highschool, I was in the percussion program with a director that was very strict on “social norms”, so things like my verbal stimming, which could be any variety of clicks and hums and other things, and my physical stims like snapping, clapping, flapping, you know the drill, were completely unacceptable. By the time I was a senior (class of 2021), I was burnt out and had buried those stims so deep that i almost forgot I had them. Im a sophomore in college now, but I work as a full time barista at sbux with a lot of neurodivergent people. Seeing my coworkers stim so casually around me caused me to start mirroring their actions (not as a mock, more like a mimic, like monkey-see monkey-do.) I realized one day that I was doing these things on my own again, and it made me so happy that I almost wanted to cry. I never should have had to mask those things, and I don’t plan on masking them to that degree ever again.