Sameness and Routines

I’m not a particularly tidy person,¹ but it distresses me in a way I can’t quite explain when things end up in the wrong place. This can be as simple as Adam putting his keys or the dog’s leash in a different spot or changing the order of the knives on the magnetic strip. My towel always goes on the same hook in the bathroom, facing in the same direction.

It’s the same thing with grocery lists. I used to be very rigid about not capitalizing the items (I would go in and “fix” it if Adam used capitals at the beginning of bullet points), but when we switched to Apple’s Notes app for lists, autocorrect started capitalizing them all. So now the rule is that they all have to be capitalized.

The order in which I put on clothes matters. My world is thrown into disarray when apps change their user interfaces.

I don’t think anything bad is going to happen because of things being different,² I just don’t like it. I can also be talked into, or talk myself into, a different “rule,” but the same “rule” has to stick. If a logical reason for a rule doesn’t exist, then whatever happens the most becomes the rule.

In other words, I rely on “sameness” for a sense of stability or have an “inflexible adherence to routines” (as per criterion B-2 in the DSM criteria for ASD). I can get a quite rage-y feeling³ about things changing without an official “rule” change.⁴ Before learning about autism, I had absolutely zero explanation for this and just thought I was just an occasionally miserable person for no reason.

I haven’t always treated routine as an important thing. But then, my mental health hasn’t always been good. In recent years, I’ve had much more respect for its place in my life. It’s been part of how I accommodate myself since starting to learn about autism, and I’ve seen a corresponding uptick in general mood. It might sound silly, but doing things in the same order in the shower makes me feel more secure. My facial care routine is soothing. It feels good to put things in the right places.

Looking back, I can see places in the past where I gave up on sameness and routines because of being made fun of for them, and I can see how giving those up caused harm to me. I’ve reclaimed some of my routines, but I can’t undo all the harm.

—

¹ In fact, my spaces have historically been disastrously messy.

² Suggesting, at least to me, that it’s probably not obsessive-compulsive behaviour.

³ I am not violent or particularly mean or anything, it just makes me stressed out.

⁴ I’ll talk more about rules and adherence to them in another post. The autistic sense of justice could be considered to fall under this criterion, but I’ve decided to separate it because, although it’s commonly observed, it’s not directly mentioned in the diagnostic criteria at all. It doesn’t have to be, obviously, because diagnostic criteria are for diagnosis, not a comprehensive list of associated traits.

—

1. AUTISM IN MY LIFE
2. SOCIAL-EMOTIONAL RECIPROCITY
3. NONVERBAL COMMUNICATIVE BEHAVIOURS
4. RELATIONSHIPS
5. STIMMING
6. SAMENESS AND ROUTINES ← you are here!