Why Autists Like Repetition
In the 80s, I knew that autism mostly could be diagnosed when you noticed a child who banged their head against the wall repeatedly, rocked back and forth, or did repetitive tasks like lining up toy trains or quoting baseball facts, calendar dates, or train schedules. This did not fit me, so I knew that I was not autistic.
What I wasn’t paying attention to was the many repetitions that I loved and thought of as normal. I enjoyed waking up at exactly the same time every day, weekday or weekend. I liked going to the same church building and seeing the same people there, singing the same songs on a regular basis, depending on the season. I liked putting up the same decorations for holidays year after year, and celebrating birthdays with the same rituals. Of course, people who are neurotypical can enjoy these kinds of rituals, but I think autists are often on the extreme edge of enjoying sameness. I am one of those people who will order the same dish at a restaurant every time I go there, because if I’ve found the best item on the menu, why would I want to “try something new” just for the sake of novelty.
Things that other people found enjoyable were difficult for me, like going on vacation. I hated hotel rooms, which smelled and sounded different than home, had the wrong blankets and pillows, and made me feel less like myself. I didn’t like meeting new people. Why would anyone? How would you know if you were going to like them in advance? As a child, I liked to read books in a series, or sometimes the same book over and over again until the binding literally fell apart in my hands. I had my favorite things and I got upset when people would try to “gift” me something new, in order to get me out of a “rut.”
And yet, I’ve also changed dramatically over the course of my life. One of my children teases me that for someone who hates change, I sure seem to have changed a lot. I don’t know what to make of this contradiction. I guess I mostly kick and scream through change, and try to carry patterns with me even through the change. My daily schedule at age fifty is similar in some ways to my schedule at age five. I’m still a morning person, and I still like to read books to put myself to sleep at night. I gave up sucking my thumb, but still pick at my neck skin as I did while sucking my thumb as a child (you can sometimes see what looks like a hickey there if I’m really stressed). My comfort food is still flake mashed potatoes, just like it was as a child.
I suppose some part of me is directed toward learning. That’s been true since I was a child, too. I was always deeply inquisitive and philosophical. At age six, I had an existential crisis as I tried to understand how God understood everything I would ever do, even this, and this, and this. I obsessed over the Greek God myths in fourth grade and memorized every one I could, because theological questions are the ones that rattle around in my head. Learning is a kind of repetition for me, a reflex that makes me feel at home in my head and in my body.
While I don’t rock back and forth, I do count from one to a hundred as a soothing repetitious habit. I do it while running, swimming, and biking. I used to keep track of the tens of thousands of steps I took in a marathon but at some point gave that up as I accepted that coming to an answer was never why I was doing this. I just like the repetition of numbers and start over and over again at one in my head, never trying to get to a particular place.