How I learned to be still

For years, the message I got was that stillness meant attention. Sit still. Make eye contact. Don’t doodle, don’t fidget, don’t do the thing your hands want to do. That meant you were taking it seriously.

I got very good at sitting still.

And I missed half of everything.

By the time I understood why, I had spent decades training myself out of a regulation tool I actually needed. Somewhere in my early twenties I started leaving my hands flat on the table in meetings. No pen. No drawing. Just two hands lying there like evidence of my professionalism. I thought I was adapting. I was making it harder to be in the room.

The thing about stimming is that it’s what some brains need in order to pay attention. The rocking, the fidgeting, the doodling, the crocheting, the tapping. That movement is doing something. It regulates the nervous system enough that the information coming in has somewhere to land. Without it, the nervous system is trying to process what’s being said and manage the discomfort of sitting still and monitor the room and track the conversation and it fails at all of them roughly equally.

I don’t know when I learned the rule. It came from everywhere. Teachers and offices and every adult room where the reward for stillness was being taken seriously and the punishment for movement was being called rude and disrespectful. I internalized it so completely I forgot I’d ever needed to move.

Reading about a woman being publicly shamed in class for crocheting — called out in front of everyone, told she was being disrespectful, while she was already in the middle of a panic attack — I felt it somewhere specific. Recognition.

Because the rule she broke is one I broke for decades on the inside, even when I looked still on the outside. The fidgeting went invisible. I hid it in my shoes, in the way I pressed my feet to the floor. But it was still there, muted and desperate, trying to do its job through any pathway I’d allow it.

What I gave up to look still was the ability to actually be present. She was sitting there with her hook and her yarn, managing her nervous system so she could stay in the room. She was actually there. More than I ever was in those meetings.

The NT rule that stillness equals focus is wrong. It works for some brains. It became the standard because those brains wrote the standard. For others, stopping the hands stops the brain. The stim is what keeps the distraction out.

I’m still learning how to let my hands do what they need to do. Forty-seven years of suppression takes a while to undo. But I notice I retain more when I’m not sitting on my own nervous system.

I don’t know what she’s making. I hope she keeps making it.