Frank-En-Furter - My Vocal Stims/Tics - The Soundtrack of My Life

For a short while now, I've found myself saying "Frank-En-Furter" out loud. Overly expressively. All the syllables given far more dramatic emphasis than they warrant.

Before that, there have been others. And before those, others still.

What I’m less sure about these days is what exactly they are.

Since my diagnosis of AuDHD, I've thought of them as autistic vocal stims; repeated sounds or phrases that help with emotional self-regulation. But the more I look into it, the less certain I am. Some of them feel stim-like. Having learned more about Tourette's and similar conditions, some feel more like vocal tics — sudden, compulsive vocalisations with an urge attached. Most sit in an awkward middle ground where the best clinical answer seems to be: this is inconveniently complicated.

That's not just me being unclear. After posting about it on Mastodon, I fell down a research rabbit hole and found that the distinction between autistic vocal stims and Tourette-style vocal tics is genuinely blurry. Clinicians and researchers acknowledge overlap, co-occurrence, and the real possibility of misclassification — especially in autistic people.

So I'm in good company, at least.

They’ve become more obvious. That doesn’t necessarily mean “worse”

Over the last few years, these vocalisations have become more prominent. MrsVark was the first to really point it out. But in a very MrsVark way, she also pointed something else out: they haven't suddenly appeared. They've always been there.

Just perhaps in more disguised, masked or suppressed forms.

That fits with what I've read. Repetitive vocal behaviour can become more visible when someone is more comfortable, less ashamed, or simply spending less energy suppressing it. In other words, what looks like "more symptoms" may actually be less masking.

That feels about right to me.

What’s changed may not be the behaviour, but my relationship to it; less suppression can look like more symptoms. And that applies to all of my ADHD and autistic traits since my diagnosis.

There's another layer to this, too. MrsVark says she finds a lot of them comforting. To her, they're often a sign that I'm relaxed, safe, and comfortable being myself. That's not a bad thing to have reflected back at you. It's considerably better than the old feeling — the one that said anything odd, repetitive or noticeable needed hiding before anyone noticed and commented. Or, for much-younger me, took the piss.

Are they involuntary? Sort of. Not exactly. Annoyingly.

This is the bit I find hardest to explain cleanly.

They’ve never felt completely involuntary in the way people often imagine tics to be. But nor do they feel like something I consciously choose to do in the way I might choose to whistle a tune or bitch about someone’s political stupidity.

The closest analogy I have is something like nail-biting. You can stop, if you try. But the urge keeps coming back, and it doesn't feel optional in any deep sense. There's a definite feeling that the thing wants doing.

Reading about this was oddly reassuring. It turns out "voluntary versus involuntary" is too simple a frame for both stims and tics. Both can involve mixed experiences of automaticity, suppressibility, effort, urge, and relief.

So if your internal experience is, “I can stop this briefly, but not indefinitely, and it doesn’t feel fully chosen anyway”, that does not make you a fraud. It just means your nervous system has declined to present itself in a nice, binary format.

There's a whole philosophical tangent here about whether anything we do is truly voluntary, or whether the brain layers on rationalisation after the fact. But it's late on a Saturday night and I've had too many ciders to go there in depth.

The line between vocal stim and vocal tic is unclear.

The usual broad distinction is this:

• Vocal stims are repetitive sounds, words, or phrases that help with regulation, comfort, focus, excitement, or expression.
• Vocal tics are sudden, recurrent vocalisations — often with a premonitory urge beforehand and a sense of relief once done.

That sounds wonderfully tidy.

In practice, the inside feel seems to matter more than the outward behaviour. The exact same repeated phrase might be classified differently depending on whether it feels soothing, satisfying, urgent, intrusive, or just... inevitable. And even then, there may be no clean answer.

What I read seemed to confirm my own feelings on my personal situation: the distinction might be “clinically interesting”, but in day-to-day life, the more useful questions are:

• what does it feel like?
• what triggers it?
• what happens if I suppress it?
• does it regulate something, relieve something, or both?

That strikes me as much more useful than arguing with myself about whether a strange little burst of speech belongs in the stim drawer or the tic drawer.

My own vocal stims/tics.

A few of these have stuck in the memory well enough to list.

• Wing Wah Chinese Supermarket
• Hands of Power!
• Cha ching ping pong
• Schhhhwibble
• Chick. Chika chikaaaa!

There have been others that came and went without being notable enough for me to record for future historians.

Wing Wah Chinese Supermarket

There is (are?) a Wing Wah Chinese Restaurant. It’s in Coventry, I think. There’s also a Chinese supermarket that I used to see regularly on the outskirts of Birmingham. Neither had the right feel to become a vocal stim until I accidentally combined them. The words have a certain pleasing shape and bounce to them. Sometimes that seems to be enough. The brain likes what it likes.

Hands of Power!

This one comes out in periods of extreme excitement or stimulation, accompanied by a hand gesture, like a power-crazed sorcerer with lightning erupting from their fingertips. The rather extreme and clearly noticeable nature of this one prompted a humorous follow-up of “fingers of disappointment” with the hands turned over to point downwards.

Cha ching ping pong!

This one is tied, at least in my head, to the frequent, money-saving, back-and-forth of tiny microloans between a friend and me to keep direct debits and other bank payments from bouncing. Think Wonga, but without the rip-off interest rates. A phrase born, as so many great human utterances are, from low-level admin.

Schhhhwibble!

No useful explanation for this one. Just Schhhhwibble! I think it’s a Black Adder or Monty Python thing.

Neurology is not always kind enough to provide footnotes.

Chk. Chka chkaaaa!

This is one of the earliest and longest-lasting ones that I can remember. This pre-dates my diagnosis by many, many years, and still reoccurs if prompted/reminded of it. Having recalled it tonight, I’ve been doing it repeatedly whilst writing this post.

It’s from Yello - The Race. Popularised by the film Ferris Bueller's Day Off. (Looking for a reference for this set off a whole rabbit hole exploration of its own this evening. This little background video was my favourite moment of that.)

What the research doesn't capture

The shit I read seemed good on definitions, overlap, suppressibility, masking and uncertainty. What it didn’t do is capture the “lived experience” of these things.

It can tell you that tics may involve urge and relief, that stims may involve regulation and familiarity, and that both are affected by stress, fatigue, excitement and context.

What it doesn’t tell you is what it feels like to realise, halfway through middle age, that some odd little things you thought were random quirks may actually have been part of a defined neurology all along.

Or what it’s like to find that the person you love doesn’t merely tolerate them, but finds them reassuring.

Or what it’s like to say one of these phrases out loud and simultaneously think:

1. that was weird, and
2. that was oddly satisfying.

It also can’t fully capture the relief of having places and people where you can mention this sort of thing, and nobody acts like you’ve lost your fucking mind.

That matters. And it’s a large part of why I’ve come to be comfortable with who and what I am.

What I know, what I don’t, and what seems most honest

What I know

• I have repeated vocalisations that have recurred over time.
• They seem to have become more visible over the last few years.
• They have not appeared from nowhere, but have become less masked or suppressed.
• Some of them feel linked to excitement, comfort, familiarity or internal pressure.
• Suppressing them is possible, but not always natural or cost-free.

What I don’t know

• Whether each one is best understood as a vocal stim, a vocal tic, or a mixture.
• Whether there is any great practical benefit in forcing every example into a clean box.
• Whether Schhhhwibble! represents a profound neurological or philosophical truth or simply the sound my brain makes when left unsupervised.

What seems most honest

The most honest answer is probably that the distinction is real, clinically meaningful in some contexts, but also often less important than “normies” might assume.

That feels like a more useful conclusion than pretending an understanding that I don’t have.

TL;DR. Or, as I was taught to write in my professional letters, “In summary”

If you repeat odd sounds, words or phrases, it does not automatically mean one single thing.

Sometimes that behaviour may be better understood as stimming. Sometimes as tic-like. Sometimes the difference is unclear. The visible behaviour alone may not tell you much; the internal experience, context, suppressibility and function matter too.

And if it’s become more obvious recently, that may not mean you’re getting worse. It may just mean you’re safer, less masked, or more at ease being yourself.

Which, all things considered, seems a better problem to have.

A few joke angles, because I am still me

I tried to write some humorous thoughts to pepper through this overly long diatribe that was originally just a Mastodon post. But none of them seemed to fit. So, rather than throw them away....

• My brain has selected this week’s loading-screen tone.
• I do not control the text; I merely host it.
• Unknown whether symptom, stim, tic, or performance art.
• Less masking, more accidental spoken-word performance.
• The phrase has chosen me. I am simply its ambassador.

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