My stimming video and why it matters
Leeds City Museum held the award-winning exhibition, Overlooked: People of Leeds as you've never seen them, in 2023. The exhibition was co-curated by the Preservative Party.
The exhibition’s themes included: LGBTQ+ voices; autistic and neurodivergent voices; the experiences of children, older people, and people with disabilities, mental illness, and physical and sensory impairments; the voices of the enslaved and the colonised; and much more.
The exhibition explored the personal stories of real local people, both past and present, which hadn’t previously been told.
Watch Sammy's stimming video and find out why it's important for raising autism awareness.
The video itself was for the section of the exhibition where we explored autism awareness. When I was researching the history of autism and specifically the vaguer term of ‘mental health’, there wasn't anything that wasn't either horrifically dehumanising to the patients, or just made you really, really angry to read. I instead decided to make a more positive history for the future - which was what I made my section of overlooked about.
Stimming is a very broad term umbrella term which lots of things fall under. For example, there are physical stims, like repetitive movements which could include flapping your hands, clapping repeatedly, clicking, things like that. Then there’s other types, like auditory stimming where someone makes noises or maybe they will listen to the same song/sound on repeat for hours and hours and hours because it helps calm them. Stimming is a form of self-soothing in a way. It can help regulate both negative emotions and positive emotions. I stim when I get overexcited because I need to release all of the energy that is bubbling up inside me. And then I stim when I am overwhelmed because I am feeling so anxious and irritated. So I need to do something with my body to help get the overwhelming energy out of it. There is such a thing as negative stimming, which can be forms of self-harm, whether intentional or not. Like I used to do a thing where I used to scratch my arms because I was just so overwhelmed and this was well before I even knew I was autistic. I have now learned better coping skills since then, and I don't do that as much anymore. But it was something that my brain needed to do to help keep me grounded in overwhelming and overstimulating situations. Overall stimming helps get rid of the energy that builds up that can sometimes lead to more overwhelming feelings. Stimming is such a vital part of keeping yourself regulated, especially for people who are neurodivergent.
I decided to make a video that showed off a bunch of my personal stims so others would know what it is, whilst also hopefully spreading a positive message about it. In the video I’m flapping my hands around, twiddling with random objects, jumping around and stuff like that. I wanted this to be something that other people might see and be like, “oh, I do that”, whilst also showing how different stimming can be for every single person.
I'm really glad I made it because it ended up being a really big part of that whole section of the exhibition, and It just made me really happy every time I went up there and saw people like reacting to the video. People really understood that stimming is not something that needs to be shunned or put away. So many autistic people have heard terms like ‘quiet hands’ or ‘gentle hands’ or ‘sit on your hands’ and ‘stop fidgeting’. This was about showing how it’s not always a bad thing or an embarrassing thing – how neurodivergent people might need to do it and its normal. One of my favourite memories was when I saw a group of young children on a school trip mimicking my stims and just laughing. They were acting like everything about it is normal and having no questions and no wondering, “hey, why is this person doing all these weird things?”. They just thought it was something fun, there was no mockery in it and it was really sweet. There was just this innocence of children and I remember coming back to talk to staff about it and bawling my eyes out.
The whole project meant so much to me and being able to work on that is probably one of my proudest achievements. The amount of people who came to me and talked about how they saw it and felt seen by it or learned from it really makes it one of my proudest achievements.
By Sammy, Preservative Party Member