Proprioception (the sense of where your body is in a space, and the thing you need in order to not be clumsy) is something I only discovered I struggled w after discovering I'm #ActuallyAutistic.
Previous to the aha moment, I coped with this by being extremely careful w my body. As I developed through toddlerhood on, my natural inclination was to be very physically cautious. That's why sports & other things were stressful for me & I never enjoyed them. I feel so much empathy and a type of compassionate pride for little me, navigating the scary overwhelming world by taking care of myself that way from the very beginning.
After the aha moment, I suddenly became clumsy when I never had been before. This was UNMASKING! After rapidly learning and synthesizing everything about what it means to be autistic, I was able to drop a lot of masks that were held in place by anxiety as a brute force coping mechanism against the world. I was surprised to become clumsy but it totally made sense.
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My autistic body & brain struggle to communicate w each other. The wires may be wired shortly. It's hard for signals from my body to make it quickly to the proper places in the brain, & may be hard for my brain to process them & turn them into useful info quickly.
Maybe this is because ALL MY SENSES ARE x11, which is just what life is like as an autistic person. We have heightened sensory input we can't turn off. It's VERY noisy in my brain.
This is why I prefer being barefoot as often as possible. My feet give me extremely important sensory input I require to feel like I know what I'm doing in my body & where I am. Being in shoes is like not having your rear view mirror when driving. You can do it, but it doesn't feel right & leaves you a little anxious due to the lack of info.
My balance is poor as well. This might be a chicken before the egg thing. Did it get that way bc I limit my physicality due to being cautious, or did I become cautious due to limited balance abilities?
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