There is a particular kind of rocking I do when something is too much. Not distressing, necessarily. Just too much. Too loud, too busy, too present, too there. My body starts before my brain does. The rocking says: hey, we need a minute. And for a long time, I treated that signal like a problem to be corrected rather than information worth listening to.
I spent years trying to stim less. Or at least, less visibly. Sitting on my hands. Pressing my feet flat to the floor. Learning to do the internal version of what my body wanted to do out loud. And I got pretty good at it, in the way you get good at things that cost you. The masking was seamless enough that most people couldn’t tell. But I could always tell. I was just spending the energy somewhere else, somewhere quieter and harder to point to.
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