I Just Embarrassed Myself (long)

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I just embarrassed myself in front of one of my professors. I've been having an issue with stimming lately. It's kind of unusual for me, but I just haven't been able to sit still over this last couple of weeks. In the desks, it's not so bad, but we use one of the conference rooms for discussion groups and they have these big, soft chairs that rock and I just can't seem to stop doing it. If I concentrate hard enough to stop moving, I lose the thread of the discussion and that is death in this class.

Well, during the last couple of classes, this one professor (who happens to be the chair of our department) started giving me a hard time about it. Not meanly, just commenting about it jokingly. He does this with a lot of students but I figured I probably was driving him nuts because I was sitting next to him, so I moved to another seat. This time the guy next to me grabbed the chair several times during class to stop me and the woman sitting next to me switched out pens with me -- apparently, I click my retractable pen unconsciously, too.

A few hours later, between classes, the professor brought it up again jokingly, saying I needed to lay off the caffeine. Then he said, "Oh, I see by your body language that you don't want to talk about it." After class, I figured I should say something to him about it, to try and explain it to him. When I tried, he stopped me quickly and told me I didn't owe him an explanation and apologized for bringing unwanted attention to me. He said I should just say, "Oh, hush, Dr. ---" when he starts up and usually I do say something like that, but the frequency of the comments made me feel there was more to it than the general gentle ribbing he usually gives his students.

I'm really embarrassed now and I'm not sure just where I misinterpreted what was going on. Was I right or wrong to try to explain things in a general way? Or am I guilty of over-sharing again? I just told him that it had to do with how much I was being forced to be around a new group of people lately -- that's all I can figure, maybe combined with the changes in work and school schedules. I was starting to think I was actually irritating him and not reading the situation correctly when he didn't just drop it after a day or two like he usually does. If so, if I had continued to treat it as a joke, it could have caused a real problem -- something that has happened to me in the past.

Has anyone else had this experience? How did you handle it?

It sounds to me like he was a little embarrassed by his own behavior in making you the center of attention.

I agree that he was likely also embarrassed, but I'm not really sure how to tell when something is actually and issue and when he's just joking around. If I take something he says as a joke and he's serious about the criticism, then it could be a problem. On the other hand, if I take his needling as potentially serious criticism, then I'm being too serious. When his complaints and needling are obviously over-blown, I can tell the difference, but with this, I can see how he might actually be annoyed and trying to down-play it with joking to avoid a real confrontation.

Also, the other students seemed to be taking his drawing attention to my stimming as an indication that it was okay for them to do so as well. I treated it with good humor, but I don't really appreciate being treated like an annoying child. (second paragraph, above.)

People do use humor to try to draw attention to things without making a big fuss out of it. He may be expecting you to "pick up" on his cues.

You mention it is a consistent thing. They are most likely annoyed. What you are seeing now is the ratcheting up. It'll probably get worse later. It's better to be safe than sorry anyway. Also, if you don't do anything you are just going to keep on worrying about it so you might as well do something. If you're wrong, meh, at worse you'll be considered overly polite. Which is not necessarily a bad thing. It is an eccentricity but it is a positive eccentricity. Or as I like to say, if you can't be normal, be someone who's weird in a positive way.

For the chair, drag a different (non-rockable) chair in and use that. Plenty of people are fussy about chairs (we recently had a worker have a fit over a chair). If anyone asks say you don't like the conference room chairs because you have a bad back. Or joke that you just can't stop rocking in it and want to remove yourself from temptation and sorry if you've been annoying people. And get a different pen.

And then never mention the issue again. It is likely that once the source of annoyance has been removed, your professor won't mention it again either.