fidgeting. Growing up, I was frequently told to stop fidgeting. I had a nearly uncontrollable desire to lean back in my chair and try to make it balance on it's two back legs. I need to wear an occlusal guard, because I grind my teeth when I sleep. I've always chewed on stuff: shirts, pencils, pens, etc. Going to sleep is scary. I used to rock myself to sleep by tightening and then relaxing one of my leg's adductor muscles in my crotch. I also used to press my hand on my heart so that I could feel my heart beating. I often catch myself inadvertently staring at light bulbs in a kind of mini-trance. I've read that autistic individual sometimes engage in stimming. Stimming is a repetitive body movement, and the word is short for self-stimulation. I don't remember ever doing any repetitive body movements, but I have certainly always engaged in self-stimulation. When I was little, I constantly walked around clutching my penis. I remember being constantly told to get my hands out of my pants. Eventually my parents got me to stop doing that.
walking. When I was growing up, people made fun of the way I walked (kind of a duck-footed, bouncing waddle). I force myself to walk with the same type of gait as other people, because I'm still conscious of the way I walk. Sometimes I feel like I still don't really know how to walk correctly.
balance. I didn't learn to ride a bicycle until I was 8 years old. Like a lot of things, I was alone when I acquired this sixth sense.
About Me
- Geniferous
- grew up in Ang Lee's The Ice Storm, contemporary of Judd Apatow. Listened to Free to Be You and Me and Yellow Submarine countless times on a phonograph that could play 16⅔, 33⅓, 45 or 78 rpm records from the inside of a large console cabinet on the floor of my living room. John Lennon was assassinated, the 1980's began, and I went through puberty. On late night radio, random people asked Dr. Ruth all variety of questions about sex. She asked, "Do you masturbate?" If the caller said yes, she gleefully exclaimed "Gut!" in Yiddish, and then took the next call. Went to college, abroad, grad school, work and more grad school. Married, started a new career and had kids. Decided that like Jung at age 37, my time for individuation had arrived. I'm ISTJ according to Myers-Briggs; I'm a five according to Enneagram; I experience "flow" as described by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi. I read The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin, but surely there must be more to it than cleaning one's closets. And what is "love" anyway? After one of my children was diagnosed with mild Asperger's, on September 24, 2010, I heard Tim Page on the radio say that he figured it out after his son was diagnosed. Oh.
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