Coping Methods: Items

I originally intended to write two posts about my therapeutic things. But I decided to mash them into one, because that makes more sense to me. Besides, I’ve written about some of this before, and there’s no reason to reiterate too much. And then again, maybe there is, since a lot of people do seem to still not get it.

Either way, I’ve covered my stims, and how they work and affect me. But stims are restricted to what I can do with myself and my body in a given situation. There are also items that relieve stress for me, because they possess a set of properties that work in a stim-like way.

It is not unusual for autistics to have what a lot of people would condescendingly term a “safety blanket”. The reason I find this condescending is fairly simple: The term safety blanket comes out of a set of concepts we connect with children and childhood, and autistics should not be infantilised. Most of us are, unsurprisingly, adults, and there’s no reason to treat us as if we’re children.

Evenso, the term safety blanket is stil far more neutral and factually accurate than the similar term in Danish, which is a lot worse in terms of the words used. I suppose that’s why I object to the term, because looking at the words “safety blanket” objectively they do actually describe the function of the items I want to talk about. Except that it’s far more complicated than being a matter of any random cloth.

The items we find comforting can be widely varied. Some have a specific clothing item, a shirt or a jacket or a cap they just cannot exist without. An autistic kid I know simply cannot function if he’s not wearing his cap. He cannot find calm unless he’s wearing it. Whether this has to do with the sensation of pressure on his skull, or whether it’s because far too many people have a tendency to touch his gorgeous red hair and thus overstimulate him badly, I don’t know. Either way, he wears his cap, he wears it to bed, even.

I think this is awesome. This kid has such a simple thing as a cap that soothes him so he can function. And his wearing a cap bothers no one. Except of course the people at the institution where he lives part-time. They believe that it’s wrong to wear a cap to bed, and so he must be forced to take it off and place it on the window sill at bedtime. The result: the poor boy never gets enough sleep, because he can’t just calmly lie down and fall asleep. He will toss and turn until he exhausts himself to sleep. ‘Cause that’s so healthy, and this is what people are willing to do to an autistic child in order to make him appear normal. The most ridiculous thing about it is: who’s gonna see him wearing his cap to bed? The carers. That’s who. Why does he need to appear more normal in the privacy of his own home? This is the kind of outright abuse that autistics are exposed to every day.

His mother is a friend of mine, and when I noticed this “take off cap and place on window-sill” as a mandatory part of his bedtime routine at the institution (it was written down, and she’d asked me to go over the list to check for problematic stuff, and there was a whole lot more than this, I tell you), I pointed out to her that there is no point to this other than a vain attempt to force him into a normalcy he can never achieve anyway and which directly harms him ie. robs him of healthy and sound sleep. Suffice to say she was furious that they’d do this to him, and she was furious that no one at the institution, which was specialised in autistics, seemed to actually know enough about autistics to know why this might be a problem. She didn’t know either, how could she? She’s not autistic and she’s not a pro carer, she’s ‘just’ his mom, who expected the pros to be able to help her help her son.

Anyway, this was just an example of how much seemingly inconsequential things can mean to an autistic person. Sure, everybody has favourite clothes, but most people won’t lose any sleep over not wearing them. Some, if not a lot, autistics might.

Me, I don’t need to wear anything specific when I sleep. I just need a blanket I can wrap myself in – as detailed in my last post. During the day, however, there are a lot of little things that make my life a lot easier, because they give me a tiny shot of comfort/calm. They’re seldom enough to avert crises, but they can make an average day a little less trying. I’ll be getting back to crisis aversion methods in another post. Though, I’m sure some of the concepts mentioned in this one can be used in that function as well.

Long sleeves are a must for me. Because I need those sleeves to wrap my hands in. That’s why I prefer winter to summer, because in summer it’s usually too warm to wear long-sleeved blouses. In the in-between periods I also have the option of thin hand/arm warmers. If it’s really cold in winter I combine shirts and thick hand/arm warmers. I need stuff around my hands. Doesn’t need to be tight, but I cannot have it too loose. I remember back in school gym class, I frequently messed up my hands due to my super-bendy joints and autism-induced clumsiness (my co-ordination is completely off), so any kind of ballgames usually involved me spraining my wrists. It became routine for me to bring bandages for use after gym class. It also became routine for me to wear those bandages way longer than was necessary, because it just felt so good to have something around my hands. I always blamed my bad and loose joints – now I’m fairly certain it’s because of the need for pressure. So now bandages have been replaced with arm/handwarmers/long sleeves and I feel better for that.

I often keep a small round stone in my pocket - usually my jacket/coat pockets. It has to be round, without any edges at all. Edges ruin the soothing effect of fiddling with the stone. And fiddling is what I do with it. It’s usually plain stones found on the beach, worn completely smooth and round by the surf. Keeping it in my palm and just holding on to it, feeling it heat up. It has a very calming effect on me. There’s a drawback to this one, though, as sometimes when I’m having a melt-down it’s really not a good idea to have things around that can be thrown. So it’s a method I need to use with some caution/planning, remembering to put it well away if I can feel my mental stability take a turn for the worse.

Ironically I’ve never been one to fiddle with my pens and pencils. Nor have I been one to chew on them – something my mother did a LOT. She jokes with having the World Record in how many pencils one person has eaten during their school years. I mostly only fiddle with smooth things.

And if I don’t have a stone or a roundish thingamajig in my keyring I can fiddle with, I have a tendency to lodge my thumb straight along the inner joints of my fingers on the same hand and then just hold my own thumbs. It’s an uncomfortable angle, but boy do I often do that. None of these work when I need my hands for doing stuff, obviously, and that makes the handwarmers a far better item in this regard.

Then there’s bigger items such as stuff made out of fur. My tactile hypersensitivity is soothed by fur. Not all fur works, mind you, but most of it does. It feels absolutely awesome and that feeling grounds me and lowers my stress levels at an amazing rate. Unfortunately I can’t bring my fur blanket with me everywhere, nor can I afford to buy actual fur clothes – they’d be too warm to wear indoors anyway.

The fur blanket I use is made of fox fur. They are left overs from other things, sown together in long strips and those strips are sown together inbetween leather strips to offer better stability than the patchwork of left-over fur skin. It is and looks like a patchwork fur blanket. I use it to cover my bed in the day time, so I can easily just lie down and get an instant boost. It has been a greater help than I anticipated when I bought it, and it is one of those things that can get me through even very hard times. Usually lying down on it for an hour or two can almost give me back half my day’s energy level. Once or twice have I slept on it through the night. Never have I slept so good, but I can’t do that regularly, because I’d wear it thin, it’d fall apart and it’d end up being ruined and I can’t just go and buy a new one. So I use it with great care, and I am very careful with not becoming dependent on it, because I simply cannot afford that.

I also have developed a fondness for reindeer pelts. And reindeer pelt is pretty amazing, because it isolates very well, and actively warms up the body lying on it, which is a double-bonus, because I tend to get very cold a lot. Not sure why – I wonder if it has anything to do with my stress levels – but it’s very annoying and sometimes even debilitating, when you can’t feel neither your fingers nor your toes, because they’re outright icy to the touch.

And there are my notebooks. They are not a stim function, as such, but they allow me to organise my mind a lot better than I otherwise could. In that regard they function sort of like a Pensieve from the Harry Potter-verse. Getting the thoughts out of my head and down on paper actually helps to put some distance to them and allows me a little respite, so I can deal with them at a time when I am better equipped to do so/have my therapist or aide present/am no longer in a situation where a tearful break-down would be detrimental to me.

I have several notebooks. At least three of them are with me at any given time. I have my specific autism/management notebook. Whenever there’s something I need to discuss with my aide, my case worker or my shrink I put it in there. It can be everyday stuff like asking my aide what it means when NTs do this or that action, or whether it is normal for NTs to say so and so or was that actually out of the ordinary. It can also be things such as asking her to help me contact xyz bureau or to check up on something for me.

It can be a bad experience that I want to talk to the shrink about, and if there’s 5 days till I’ll see him I may actually forget when I’m there, because other things will be foremost in my mind, and then the experience won’t be dealt with until it has festered and caused real damage. It can also be a simple thing such as remember to ask case worker for deadline on xyz stuff, or remember to tell case worker about xyz progress.

That notebook is my practical hands-on thing.

Then there’s my little one for ideas and random thoughts that would be distracting if I kept thinking about them in an attempt to remember them. Or if I stopped thinking about them, the annoyance I’d feel over forgetting them would distract me. So they are written down – even the bad ideas. It in this little notebook that I write down a good idea for a post, a good idea for a brief snippet of dialogue for a story I’m writing, an overview of the order of a post series, a priority list of things to do, a recipe someone told me about that sounded good, a name and background outline for an RP character. Anything really. There are many interesting things in it by now.

My third notebook is for poetry. I haven’t written as much as I would like the past couple of years. It sort of just lulled. Don’t know why. It’ll pick up again, I’m sure. I always keep it with me – just in case an idea strikes me.

A notebook I only carry with me sometimes is my RP-class notes. I teach an RP class one night/week – 10 weeks/semester. And the kids are so unpredictable that I frequently have to rewrite what I’d prepared for them. By now I’ve stopped preparing anything more than what I’ll need for the next class, rather than preparing a full semester’s classes at once. But that means I need to take more time out of my weekly schedule to prepare these things, and then it’s good to have a notebook specifically for this.

Then there’s my big notebook for my world. The fictional place in my head, the existence of which I first became consciously aware of at age 13-ish. I’ve mentioned it before and I’ll come back to it again. I started describing it in a sort of encyclopedic way several years ago. Outlining different races and nations etc. etc. yes, I am effectively writing an encyclopedia or rather: a world atlas of this world that only I know. I cannot bring this notebook with me everywhere, because it is big (like A4 format) and doesn’t fit neatly into every bag I own.

Then there’s my other A4 notebook. Considerably thinner than the other, though, for reasons that ought to be obvious. It is the one I use to write out entire passages, when I want to write full text, but can’t bring the computer, say, on to the lawn or somesuch ‘strange’ places one might place oneself in order to write in relative comfort.

But yeah, at least three of them are with me at all times.

And then there’s my books. Regular books. It soothes me to be around books, to touch books, to smell books, to see books. I organise my bookshelves, and these days I have so little room, that I’ve had to arrange the books with two rows on each shelf, and there’s almost no order left, and it’s messing with my head. I always carry at least one book with me along with the notebooks, because sometimes I just need a little literary escapism, and that’s a fairly easy thing to supply – as long as I remember to bring the book. Heck, sometimes it helps just to flip through the pages, enjoying the feel of the paper between my fingers.

Aaaaaand last but not least, though I’m loathe to count my cat as an item, I do think this post is where he fits in the best. Cuddling with my cat has a calming effect like few other things. The soft fur, the utterly therapeutic purr… yeah, I don’t know what I’d do without him.

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