‘Autistic joy’ describes the all-encompassing, very intense feeling of joy and excitement that many autistic people experience. This may be over things which seem small to other people (but definitely aren’t small!). The joy completely absorbs us in that moment. It can feel very intense and radiate throughout our whole body. We often release this feeling through stimming.
Autistic joy can feel like:
- being flooded with warmth, like sparks travelling through your body
- your surroundings melting away and the joy being all you can focus on
- being completely consumed by the feeling of joy
- like every part of your body is tingling
- needing to move and stim to release the feeling
- the intensity can also feel overwhelming or exhausting
Autistic Joy: My Favourite Part of Autism — Authentically Emily
Autistic people often experience emotions more intensely than non-autistic people. While intense emotions can sometimes be challenging, they also bring unique and profound moments of happiness. Autistic joy is a feeling of intense happiness and excitement that Autistic people experience. This blog post is a celebration of Autistic joy and the experiences that bring these happy feelings.
Some examples of activities and experiences that can cause feelings of Autistic joy include:
- Interests and hobbies
- Spending time with special people or animals
- Sensory experiences
- Time in nature
- Happy stimming
- Autistic ways of socialising
The new season of my favorite show just came out. As the main title appears, I’m so excited I’m bouncing, laughing, and widely flapping my hands. I’m so excited about the show that my family joins in on my celebration. My joy opens up a new experience for my neurotypical family. I feed even more off of their joy and I’m buzzing.
My autistic joy is one of my favorite things about being autistic. It can be intense as a meltdown, but filled with overwhelming happiness and excitement. When I experience joy, I feel the excited vibrations throughout my body. To release the energy, I do what I like to call “happy stim.” I will jump up and down, excitedly flap my hands, sometimes even dance. I don’t see neurotypical adults experience or express joy as I do.
Many autistics have been made fun of and had to suppress their autistic joy. For many years professionals didn’t understand stimming. It was thought to be harmful and autistics were made to suppress their stims, whether the stims were happy or upset. Now with the help of the autistic community, stimming has become more accepted. However, many still don’t understand the difference between happy or distressed stimming. Stimming is important to my autistic joy. If I suppress the joyful stimming, the joy can turn into anxiety.
My special interests are one of the ways that I experience autistic joy.
Eating my favorite food, playing with my favorite stim toys, and touching something that is very soft can all give me a spark of joy. I’ve been known to do a happy dance while eating a good steak dinner and stim dance for hours just to feel the movement.
The way I feel joy is an integral part of my autistic experience. It’s a beautiful part of being autistic and should be celebrated.
I seem to find two pathways to autistic joy: one is through achieving a mental state of flow and the other achieves the same, but through the flow state of complete relaxation.
Autistic Joy — Neurodiverse Connection
The aspect that links these two states of autistic joy, is the lack of self-consciousness. A lifetime of masking has meant but I am very rarely unaware of myself in the context of my environment and other people, but these two states of flow are totally immersive and leave no room for the intrusion of the world around me. To feel that is joyous.
The word joy is sort of quite a meaningful word for a lot of people. For me, I see it more as just accepting who I am and the way I am as a person, the emotions I have or don’t have. I think the main times of joy is when I’m actually talking with other Autistic people and we sort of bounce off each other, that’s when I come alive. But in terms of the day-to-day joy, it’s more my acceptance for myself.
Beyond Acceptance: Autistic Joy Roundtable — Neurodiverse Connection
Autistic joy is a beautiful type of joy to watch and see because generally it’s highly expressive (although not for everybody). There’s often a lot of movement with it. So, whereas we might stim to regulate, we might also stim in our joy and feelings of belonging. There’s not many places that I feel safe enough to be fully expressive in my joy without wondering ‘how much can I express about how passionate I am about that’? For me it’s a very inward experience and it took me a long time to get to a nervous system state and non-trauma state to even feel that I had that real expression in me.
Beyond Acceptance: Autistic Joy Roundtable — Neurodiverse Connection
For me, embodiment is the well of joy in our body, the well of our being and our true authentic, unmasked self. And for me it feels like something that moves upwards through the body. It’s a kind of warm space in the heart, but it also goes beyond that. And I don’t know how often we see it in Autistic adults—or even in Autistic children. It feels like joy is not particularly prevalent in our society, anywhere. But I congratulate the Autistic community in their expression of Autistic joy, modelling to the rest of humanity that there’s a possibility that we can uncouple from the low vibe of society and come into joy.
I think with Autistic joy, it’s about people understanding the importance of it, the uniqueness of it and understanding that wider ‘spiky profile’ concept. There’s nothing wrong with our spiky profiles in comparison to a neurotypical peer in terms of our skills and our needs. Autistic joy is really part of that. And with support that can be such a huge part of a really fulfilling lovely life to live. But we’re not given that at the moment. We’re so rarely given that opportunity and the support to make that really lovely thing. At the moment it is masked, or seen as childish, or considered something that you shouldn’t be engaging with. But actually in a better society and in a more fulfilling society, it would support us to engage with education and hobbies and interests and all of those things that at the moment we are often so pulled away from because we’re not allowed to just be who we are.
As an ex-teacher, one of the main goals of the education system, in my experience, is to quash joy—particularly embodied joy—in all Neurotypes. But particularly the neurodivergent expression of joy is really hammered out once you go to pre-school. I spend a lot of my time envisioning what education could be like if we base it on enjoying and following the trains of our interests, thoughts, impulses and longings. And I really believe we can have a functional learning environment based on themes or topics that people bring and spark off. It can happen, but it requires thinking outside the box within the educators and creativity – which is the landscape of joy anyway.
Love is the common thread of belonging. When I’m in my Autistic joy, I’m connected and my heart is like Wooosh really big now. I take that in and it happens to me daily. It’s happened to me today. I take that into an environment where there are non-Autistic people and within I can feel now straight away what that does to me, to my heart. I’m perceived as different and it closes down, I shrink and I compress. So how do we take this into communities and belonging? We have to ally, we have to link our arms and, and the hold tight that we’re able to stay in our joy. To become this force that pushes it out, to push down the forces that want to close it down. It comes back to what Adam said, it’s a liberation action. And liberation can only happen in community and that’s holding each other tight as we move forward.
So I think what it all boils down is that Autistic joy is a catalyst and a place that takes us somewhere where we feel safe, where we feel supported, where we have that community, and something we’ve come back to again and again is that having Autistic joy is a place where we can love and we can feel loved.
Autistic Joy is intense – like everything we do. An autist in a state of engrossing joy can be just as intense as one in a meltdown. Our joy can be so consuming that it comes out in our movements and our voices, our happyflapping hands, our vocalizations, singing, and humming. We DO our joy – we hop, we dance, we skip and twirl, we clap and jump with excitement.
When I watch a favorite show – recently it’s been Monty Python’s Flying Circus – and a well-loved joke hits me just right, I don’t just laugh. My hands shake back and forth with pure glee, which I couldn’t hold back if I wanted to. I rock back and forth on my couch, grinning madly with excitement as I start my favorite movie or series for the 50th time. Listening to music I love, I can’t be still. If I’m at home, I’ll dance and jump up and down at the really good parts. If I’m driving, I can contain some of the movement, but at the very least my head and shoulders bop back and forth. My body is an instrument of my emotions – I can’t feel without it – and it allows me to feel and express my happiness and joy to the utmost degree.
We find our joy in all kinds of things that NTs often miss. The play of light and shadow on the ground under a tree; a rush of wind through the trees that feels like it could lift you off your feet and teach you to fly. A delightful little play on words or a quote that matches up perfectly to the current situation. Any little thought that makes us giggle to ourselves even though we wouldn’t bother explaining it to someone else because it’s dependent on the way our own brain makes connections between ideas.
The extra intense way in which we experience the world gives us more to enjoy. The right sort of fabric or texture can put us into a state of bliss. A bite of a favorite food can send us into a happy dance. We can listen to the same song over and over for hours and get not only the same enjoyment out of it each time, but also a cumulative build-up of happiness that comes from finding new harmonies and melodies and letting the music seep so deep into our brains that it becomes part of us.
So to bring it back to autistic joy, it’s my personal belief that joy comes from growth, from that stretch. The way plants reach towards the sun, they open up to the sun, to that solar center,
but they also do that in opposition to gravity, to habit, and all of those things. So undoing the habitual normalizing of self-negation, and growing into our potential is what I would define as
autistic joy.
And like you, for me, autistic joy would be that sense of being fully embodied, fully embraced, fully seen. Being able to fully live out without masking, without medication, and without the need for meltdown, because in my experience it’s so exhausting. So I guess, to simply be unapologetically autistic, without needing to evidence that neurologically or to say that you have this diagnostic assessment, and so on.
Uninhibited, consuming, and brought on by small everyday things as much as by big events. That’s autistic joy.
Autistic Joy – Autistic Empath
