Every Saturday at 10am Central (4pm UK), our Stimpunks Community gathers online to share life and stories in our Solidarity Session held in Discord. Some people have their cameras on; many don’t. Some of us speak, some use text, and many of us share memes throughout the session as people hop in and out and take bodymind breaks. In the background, we’re invited into a shared watch. For the past few months, we’ve been watching otters as our conversations ebb and flow.
Watching the otter cam together offers our community a source of co-regulation. Today, it gave me a focus when I was unable to listen or even join in verbally, but I still wanted to exist in parallel with the group online.
As I watched the otters and occasionally joined the text conversation, I started thinking about how much I’d love to be an otter, and how liberating that might be. I found myself watching their movement and behaviours and relating them to my own Autistic experience, wondering whether I’m not so far removed from the life of an otter already!
Many otters keep a preferred stone tucked in a pouch of skin, carrying and reusing it time and time again. It’s a bit like a comfort item or a stim tool, something reliable and joyful to return to. Special interests and sensory objects can work the same way for Autistic and monotropic people, as ways of stimming, which enable regulation through a flow state.
Many otters like to play alone. They may juggle a stone, somersault in open water, float on their backs and dive around. Every so often, they play with another otter for a short time, before each one drifts back into its own separate absorption and interest – a bit like going from their solitary Cavendish cave space to their social Cavendish watering hole space. I have observed many moments of shared delight as they play and live with their own freedom to just be themselves and exercise their bodily autonomy.
It feels similar to how our Solidarity Session runs, and it’s part of why it works for us as neurodivergent people. It allows a space in the week, away from the dominance of neuronormativity, where people can just exist and be themselves, with intermittent shared moments of collaboration, shared glimmers, infodumps, parallel play, body-doubling and coping support offered.
Maybe it isn’t only that otters are soothing to watch, though they definitely are for me! It might be that they offer an embodied version of something our community already knows and lives.
Every Saturday, the otters just get to be otters, and in a supportive, safe space like our Stimpunks Solidarity Session, we get to do the same. We can just be present; we don’t have to perform. We get to show up for each other, in whatever way we can that day, which is its own radical act. We co-regulate and join in on our own terms, in our own way, when we want, with no judgment, just being with a community that cares and ‘gets each other’.
Maybe we all need to have more time to be more like Otters!
You are welcome to join us!
Find out more here: Stimpunks Solidarity: The Radical Act of Showing Up For Each Other
