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walk in his ways...
I've got tagged by ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
terredancer, so ...
Once you've been tagged, you have to write a blog with 6 facts about yourself.In the end you need to choose 6 people to be tagged and list their names.and I never tag, so feel free to run with it if you want.
I've talked a lot about my feelings and my life and my fandom interests and all that sort of stuff already, so I'm going to talk about six things about the physical me that are important to who I am, which I don't think I've really talked about a lot on here. Those of you who only know me from the 'net probably don't know these yet; those of you who've seen me in person have probably been wondering about them.
1. I walk on my toes. This is a recognized medical condition known as "Idiopathic Toe Walking", which means that I walk on my toes and nobody knows why. When I was around four or five my parents took me to a specialist just to make sure that there wasn't something more serious going on, and he had me walk around and looked at my feet and my back and saw that I could walk perfectly normally if I tried, and said, "Nope! She just likes to walk on her toes." He did mention that if my parents were really concerned, there was a surgery on the tendons he could try. This was sufficiently scary that I became quite used to walking normally if I thought people were watching. But it wasn't scary enough to make me walk on my heels all the time. I posted a long comment about the mechanics of it a while ago on a![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
little_details thread asking for help with demon-creatures that have furry-style digitigrade legs.
Research seems to suggest that ITW usually goes away by the teenage years; I never lost it entirely, these days I switch between toe-walking and flat-foot fluidly - I usually don't even know which I'm doing unless I actually think about it. Actually I have three gaits: toe-walking with heel off the ground, which I use most often for short stretches or scrambling; the "normal" human heel-toe gait, which I do tend to fall into when thinking about it or going for long-range speed and efficiency; and a gait that falls in between, where I put the heel down too, but either simultaneously with or after the ball of the foot; this may be my most common one these days, but it's often a compensation for my shoes.
I've actually been web-surfing around about this lately (actually, it was one of the first web searches I did (I suppose everybody had something about them that they searched first, wanting to see if they were alone) - ten years ago, there was nothing available on the web about it. Now, there's quite a bit. Unfortunately, very little of it is helpful: a lot of what appears to be factual is either people trying to convince parents to use invasive, unneccessary "cures", or it's talking about the toe-walking that occurs as a result of other diagnosable physical problems. And there is no consensus whatsoever on occurrence, either. There are really three threads that interest me, though: the first is the association of toe walking with generally weird brain wiring, especially autism. Although the sites that seem most believable on that tend to group the gait in with rocking and flapping, which seem slightly different. There's also been one or two very small studies which associate toe-walking with language delays, and quite a bit of anecdotal accounts that toe-walkers often have accelarated language, which seems to just associate it in general with differences in language processing.
Another interesting anecdotal trend is that every time a concern about teasing or harassment was mentioned, it was the only the parents or doctors who worried - and they were often surprised that the kids were completely unconcerned about it. I can back this up - I got almost no hassle about my walking (as opposed to, say, hassle about my shoes or my hair). Which honestly suprised me too - but I've never known a toe-walker from the outside, so maybe it just isn't all that noticeable. But then, I got fair amount of annoyance from grown-ups (even sometimes at my current age!) saying how precious that I'm a ballerina, more than I ever got from kids about anything. Maybe toe-walkers just tend to also be good at deflecting criticism - or perhaps the ones who are bothered train themselves to stop doing it.
There's also occasional hints that in some situations, toe-walking is actually the more efficient gait - although this is never, ever mentioned in conjunction with habitual toe-walkers, of course. Since it's so very important to mold our children into perfect little round pegs, after all. Google isn't giving me *any* freely available info on energy use and toe-walking in otherwise normal humans - I may have to go exploit the university library again! Whee! But after all, sprinters and cats both go on their toes. Although oddly, I tend to run flat-foot : I got in the habit in high school gym, where putting all the weight and momentum straight down at once was the best way to *not* end up face down in the mud (it also maximizes the splash); and I run so infrequently I never got out of the habit.
Anyway, that was way more than you wanted to know about *that*. Perhaps I should leave the other five for later. And yes, I do put that much thought into everyday walking. I've always had to. Explains a lot about me, doesn't it?
terredancer, so ...Once you've been tagged, you have to write a blog with 6 facts about yourself.
I've talked a lot about my feelings and my life and my fandom interests and all that sort of stuff already, so I'm going to talk about six things about the physical me that are important to who I am, which I don't think I've really talked about a lot on here. Those of you who only know me from the 'net probably don't know these yet; those of you who've seen me in person have probably been wondering about them.
1. I walk on my toes. This is a recognized medical condition known as "Idiopathic Toe Walking", which means that I walk on my toes and nobody knows why. When I was around four or five my parents took me to a specialist just to make sure that there wasn't something more serious going on, and he had me walk around and looked at my feet and my back and saw that I could walk perfectly normally if I tried, and said, "Nope! She just likes to walk on her toes." He did mention that if my parents were really concerned, there was a surgery on the tendons he could try. This was sufficiently scary that I became quite used to walking normally if I thought people were watching. But it wasn't scary enough to make me walk on my heels all the time. I posted a long comment about the mechanics of it a while ago on a
little_details thread asking for help with demon-creatures that have furry-style digitigrade legs. Research seems to suggest that ITW usually goes away by the teenage years; I never lost it entirely, these days I switch between toe-walking and flat-foot fluidly - I usually don't even know which I'm doing unless I actually think about it. Actually I have three gaits: toe-walking with heel off the ground, which I use most often for short stretches or scrambling; the "normal" human heel-toe gait, which I do tend to fall into when thinking about it or going for long-range speed and efficiency; and a gait that falls in between, where I put the heel down too, but either simultaneously with or after the ball of the foot; this may be my most common one these days, but it's often a compensation for my shoes.
I've actually been web-surfing around about this lately (actually, it was one of the first web searches I did (I suppose everybody had something about them that they searched first, wanting to see if they were alone) - ten years ago, there was nothing available on the web about it. Now, there's quite a bit. Unfortunately, very little of it is helpful: a lot of what appears to be factual is either people trying to convince parents to use invasive, unneccessary "cures", or it's talking about the toe-walking that occurs as a result of other diagnosable physical problems. And there is no consensus whatsoever on occurrence, either. There are really three threads that interest me, though: the first is the association of toe walking with generally weird brain wiring, especially autism. Although the sites that seem most believable on that tend to group the gait in with rocking and flapping, which seem slightly different. There's also been one or two very small studies which associate toe-walking with language delays, and quite a bit of anecdotal accounts that toe-walkers often have accelarated language, which seems to just associate it in general with differences in language processing.
Another interesting anecdotal trend is that every time a concern about teasing or harassment was mentioned, it was the only the parents or doctors who worried - and they were often surprised that the kids were completely unconcerned about it. I can back this up - I got almost no hassle about my walking (as opposed to, say, hassle about my shoes or my hair). Which honestly suprised me too - but I've never known a toe-walker from the outside, so maybe it just isn't all that noticeable. But then, I got fair amount of annoyance from grown-ups (even sometimes at my current age!) saying how precious that I'm a ballerina, more than I ever got from kids about anything. Maybe toe-walkers just tend to also be good at deflecting criticism - or perhaps the ones who are bothered train themselves to stop doing it.
There's also occasional hints that in some situations, toe-walking is actually the more efficient gait - although this is never, ever mentioned in conjunction with habitual toe-walkers, of course. Since it's so very important to mold our children into perfect little round pegs, after all. Google isn't giving me *any* freely available info on energy use and toe-walking in otherwise normal humans - I may have to go exploit the university library again! Whee! But after all, sprinters and cats both go on their toes. Although oddly, I tend to run flat-foot : I got in the habit in high school gym, where putting all the weight and momentum straight down at once was the best way to *not* end up face down in the mud (it also maximizes the splash); and I run so infrequently I never got out of the habit.
Anyway, that was way more than you wanted to know about *that*. Perhaps I should leave the other five for later. And yes, I do put that much thought into everyday walking. I've always had to. Explains a lot about me, doesn't it?
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. . . he works for Boeing now. OMG brain wiring!
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I don't think my parents or doctors ever noticed. I do have a pretty weird gait other than the forefoot walking bit. It is more like a waddle. You can tell when it is me walking. And I think most people are too polite to mention it.
And as you know I am autistic (Asperger's) and I've been told we have weird gaits. I've never noticed.
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Not noticing is probably better than some of the things which are being promoted by doctors. Putting kids in casts for six months at a time? Injecting them with botox to paralyze the leg muscles? Um.
Huh. I'd never really heard about a connection between Asperger's and gait before - most of the stuff I was finding about tip-toes implied that it show up mostly in cases with language deficit. But that's definitely more confirmation of the "just generally weird brain wiring" hypothesis.
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Personally I think a lot of what the doctors do is totally unnecessary. Damn curbies.