Rock the Boat

Lately I’ve been unlearning the shame around my me-ness.

I’ve always rocked. When I sit, my knee bounces; when I stand, I sway. I pace when I talk and jiggle when I think. My parents used to say, “Meridith, you’re making me seasick.”

But it comforts me. It always has.

Rhythm, wind, quiet - a swing was my first meditation.

When I was a kid, I loved to swing, the rhythm, the wind in my ears, the way it made everything quiet and fast at the same time. I would pump my legs in rhythm to Robert Louis Stevenson’s poem:

How do you like to go up in a swing,

up in the sky so blue?

Oh, I do think it’s the pleasantest thing

ever a child can do.

I’m chasing that same rhythm when I rock. It’s calming.

But the lunchroom wasn’t so idyllic. I’d be sitting, rocking, narrating a story (probably very loudly), and someone would snicker, “Meri, who’s under the table?”

I kind of got the joke. I understood why it was funny. But it stung because I wasn’t trying to be weird or sexy or anything at all. I rock when I talk; I move when I listen. I sway when I think, and I pace when I can't. I am a metronome.

During my years teaching in classrooms or working field sales, I found spaces where movement was allowed. Walking the room, gesturing, talking with my whole body. Those moments let my brain breathe.

I miss that. I even miss rocking my babies when they were small, because holding and swaying a child was a time no one questioned my motion. It was the perfect disguise: affection as regulation. I can rock a baby all day.

So yeah, I stim. I rock, shake, and pace. It’s how I sync with the world and find my ohm. I'm generally not anxious when able to stim; it calms me.

For real, the mystery here isn’t why I do it.

It’s how the hell everyone missed that I was neurodivergent the whole time,

and why some still purse their lips or roll their eyes when I am being me,

the best way I know how.

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