This exploration is a live draft. It is not perfect. (What is?) It will organically change through the course of time it exists. If you take the time to both read and participate and, at any point, wish to discuss or contribute you can email me here. I am Rachel Eleanor Brook, a multi-disciplinary artist embarking on a part-time masters of fine art at Newcastle University. I am autistic and I have ADHD. I additonally have a diagnosis of narcolepsy with cataplexy and premature ovarian failure (more commonly known as early onset menopause). I have thus far lived a difficult life. Both parents died before I reached the age of 16, I have been sexually assaulted more times than I feel comforatble disclosing, I have battled with trauma induced depression and anxiety for most of my life and I have experinced prolonged bouts of binge drinking and problematic eating. I am a happy, healthy cat parent and I have an ever-growing extensive community of brilliant human beings around me who consitently inspire me and bring me unlimited joy and pleasure.
I created this page of my website because I. LOVE. STIMMING – IF YOU LOVE STIMMING TOO you can contribute to my ARCHIVE OF STIMS!
Autistic stimming is a deeply personal and specific act. One that is nuanced, special and unique to the individual stimmer. If you are new to the term it is a shortform way of saying “self stimulatory behaviour” a term that emerged from early autism research to describe behaviours that produce sensory reward. If you are autistic and stimming is part of your wider spectrum of characteristics contributing to your whole autistic authentic self, you will know what these behaviours are. I knew that I engaged in stimming long before I had the language to explain it. I am here to empower myself and my autistic peers to take full ownership of this term, to autonomously explore our identity. Stimming is deeply important to many of our community and can explore and share that ownership as an act of joyful resistance. My aim through this exploration is to re-vision stimming as something that we can have power and ownership of and view it as an act that allows us to fully immerse in our authentic sense of self. I aim to encourage all acts of stimming that are safe to the individual and others and to discourage stimming shame. Where acts of stimming may cause social, cultural and physical problems for the individual, I am to encourage the removal of shame and guilt and to empower the most privileged of our community to be advocates for and give support to all of our autistic peers to enage in safe stimming.
When I explore and talk about autistic stimming, I am coming at it through the language of personal perspective and lived experience. However, I acknowledge that each individual stimmer explores this in their own way. I do this with joy and generosity and with the full awareness that there will be people out there who would be uneasy or even repulsed by some, most or even almost all of my joyful and pleasurable stims, and vice-verser. There may also be folks out there who would find equal amounts of joy, arousal and relaxation from my extensive list of stims.
The reason that this is so nuanced and specific is simply because each autistic experience is nuanced and specific. I am a person who was diagnosed as autistic late in life, and that late-stage diagnosis has been a positive experience for me, whilst recognising that it isn’t a positive experience for all, and an awareness that having an autism diagnosis came come with levels of grief and a process of going through an abindance of enormous life-changing perspectives. I am a privileged autistic person as, for me, late stage diagnosis has been a largely positive journey of self-discovery and recognition of my true authentic self. While stimming can be perceived through certain optics as simply a symptom of a condition, I prefer to explore my unique stims as joyful, celebratory and as an act of pleasure activism, a term used to explore pleasure as political resistance. (Adrienne Maree Brown, Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2019).
“Autism is genetic – and why this information matters now” Dr Judith Brown, Head of Autism Knowledge and Expertise at National Autistic society 15/09/2026 – https://www.autism.org.uk/blog/autism-is-genetic-and-why-this-information-matters-now
The National Autistic Society states definitivley that autism is genetic.
“Autism is genetic. You’re born autistic and you’re autistic for life. Most autistic people are autistic because of genes they got from their parents. This is why autism often runs in families. Much less commonly, other factors can play a role, but usually in combination with genes from parents. There isn’t a single ‘autism gene’. Thousands of genes combine to make a person autistic. Scientists have identified many of these genes, but they think there are still many more to find. And there is no genetic test for autism. We don’t fully understand how genes combine to make a person autistic. It is complex and no simple test can give an accurate answer. Genetic testing cannot predict whether a child will be autistic or not, and it can’t be used to diagnose someone as autistic.” – https://www.autism.org.uk/blog/autism-is-genetic-and-why-this-information-matters-now 2026
Like the complex combination of gentic factors that can combine to make a person autistic, stimming too is made up of many parts. There is no binary spectrum but a circular one. The use of the term spectrum creates a deep societal misunderstanding, often viewed by people as the autistic individual existing at one end or the other, like a sliding scale between being very autistic and not autistic. As an act of joyful resistance I reject the word spectrum as it is too often associated with this aforementioned linear structure. Autism is polythetic, wherein diagnosis is built up through a specific amount, or more, of a combination of different genetic factors. This is where the misunderstanding arises, that someone can be more or less autistic than another person. Which is deeply inaccurate as, in reality, the difference is about how each individual’s personal and nuanced combination of characteristics impact their life. So, for example, I can be a stimmer, have OCD, sensory hypersensitivity, IBS, urinary tract sensitivity, social anxiety, decision paralysis, demand avoidance and (just about) hold down a job, or do a university degree and have romantic relationships and another person could have all these characteristics too, whilst also being non-verbal and they will have a completely different experience of the world. Additionally, how we stim impacts our social, educational, professional and interpersonal engagement with the world.
Stims can be joyfully explored through smell, touch, taste, sound, vision and aesthetic regard. They can be vocal or involve movement or rhythm – even dance! All of a person’s unique autistic factors that can lead, very specifically, to those joyful stimming experiences can also be the exact same reason why a person becomes overstimulated. Sometimes the act of specifically doing something that allows you to have a self-stimulatory experience can be used to counteract the overstimulation of unpleasant sensory overload.
I personally find it impossible to separate my experience of being queer with my experince of being autistic. I believe that being autistic in intrinsicly queer in terms of intentity and Queer in the academic sense. I love and celebrate all intersectonal aspects of LGBTQIA+ culture and identity.
I recently revisited Susan Sontag’s Notes on Camp and was inspired by the playful and personally exploratory way that Sontag thinks about all things camp. This entire page and developing archive is an homage to Notes on Camp. I am thus introducing Notes on Stimming, an initially personal list my own experience of stimming. Notes on Camp acknowledges this very, like, kind of simple and beautiful awareness of when something is pleasurable and when it is not.
Notes on Stimming
- Experimental explorations of synthesized sound, particularly the audible ripples within the song Computer Love by Kraftwerk.
- Rubbing my hands up and down on the cold angled edge of an open laptop.
- Inserting my hands into bags of seeds, lentils, grains or anything that is rounded and smooth.
- It is rubbing my finger around the top angled cartilage of my ears, and occasionally one slight angled bit of cartilage on the left side of my nose.
- It is inserting all of my fingers between my toes at once.
- It is drinking through the tip of a beaker straw at a rhythmic pace, so that the water squirts onto my tongue.
- It is lying face down in a bath and blowing bubbles in the water and feeling my body float, specifically in a non-titillating or sexual way, feeling my breasts bounce around in water, held up by the buoyancy.
- It is eating specifically textured foods, including anything with a sharp angle and a crunch, specifically and consistently what is known as a bag of party mix.
- It is massaging my own forearms and a methodological dance
- It is the smell of seaside sewage, fern scented Bromley soap, the smell of burned cheese, not blackened, but at the point where it has solidified.
- It is salt on avocados.
- It is every possible shape of a cat in every possible position that a cat can find itself in.
- A happy dog panting and wagging its tail.
- It is textiles on my face, but only specific textiles: smooth, stretchy, PU, elasticated, shiny, polyester lining for dresses and inside coats, any puffer jacket ever on my face.
- It is turning the sleeping bag inside out and feeling the shiny side on my skin.
- It is imagining (and only specifically imagining and not actual real life feeling of) the feeling of being completely restrained and unable to move and tensing up your entire body so that it feels like you have been forced to stay completely still.
- Seeing faces in inanimate objects. EVERYWHERE. All the time.
- Smell-based synaesthesia in response to colour. Why does dark brown silicone sealant smell like Nutella?
- Collecting rocks and shells based on simply knowing what the good ones are.
This is just a very preliminary list. There are way, way, way more to add. It will evolve and extent over time.
