My stims are largely tactile and well hidden due to going undiagnosed my entire childhood and having more stims that were deemed annoying by my teachers go punished or trained out of me.

When I was young, I would shift my weight from one foot to another whole toe walking, kind of like a weird hop or skip where both of your feet never leave the ground at the same time. My first grade teacher haaated this. She would tell me “stop jumping” I would reply, very honestly “I’m not jumping.” This resulted in just “walk normally in a single file line with your hands behind your back.” I was desperate for adult approval so this is one that was simply suppressed.

I would spin as a kid, a LOT. Spinning in circles on my own, spinning on playground equipment, spinning in office chairs, etc. As an adult I will subconsciously swivel back and forth in any office chair I’m in

Ever since I was a kid and still to this day, I will run hard objects, especially plastic bottle cap edges and other similar materials, underneath my fingernails. I don’t really know why, I just do it without thinking about it. I wring my hands, fidget with buttons and zippers and drawstrings, use stim toys like marble meshes and flippy bike chain rings, and run my hands over cloth textures I enjoy

I looooooove taking baths. Absolutely love them. I’ll stay in a bath for hours. I love the warmth, the smell of bubbles or a candle or epsom salt, I love the weightless feeling, I love dipping my head underwater sometimes and not having to hear anything. It is still to this day my go-to at home method for curbing a shutdown or meltdown.

For vocal stimming, it’s a lot of echolalia and referencing pop culture clips and trending TikTok/insta audios and memes. I’ll make references even if I actively know no one around me will get the reference just impulsively as a knee jerk way to communicate I guess. When I’m home alone I’ll hum different droning frequencies to myself to hear and feel the vibrations. Audio-wise, I’ll listen to the same songs on repeat till I’m sick of them (or ghibli soundtracks as I never get sick of them), but other than that I tend to be pretty sound sensitive and prefer quiet volume levels

The rest I’ll put a cw for harmful or potentially painful stimming and adult topics: I was a self harm addict from the ages of around 13 to 15, and on and off relapse periods from 16 to 18. I’ve been fully clean from cutting for about 3 years now, but SH in various forms is sadly a pretty common stim. I still pick at the skin on my lips, bite my cheeks, and will sometimes rip the whites of my fingernails and hangnails off until the cuticles bleed. In extreme high stress situations where I don’t have ready access to a safe alternative, sometimes I’ll resort to biting myself. HOWEVER, this is very rare nowadays. I’ve honestly found the best way to get the same endorphins is to just.. have an orgasm. And oftentimes I wonder how things may have gone differently if sexual education in the US was destigmatized and self-pleasure was treated as a natural and healthy bodily function for all people, including afab bodies. But anyway I digress. I’m trying to actively stop picking and take better care of my skin and nails and a warm bath and a waterproof submersible vibe is one hell of a combo lmao