Routines

From thAutcast, because his questions make good post fodder.

Routines are import to many autistic people. How do routines help you (or an autistic person you know well)? I am especially interested in stories about what happens when routines are disrupted.

And now I answer.
I like my routines. I remember them pretty well, too, as long as they are the same and they are repeating. I memorized my schedule very quickly in middle and high school, and every time they changed the order of the periods on me, I was confused and often went to the wrong class. By often, I mean almost every time. Disrupt a routine that is already extant, and I get pretty confused. 
And I form routines pretty easily. I can't let myself skip class once, because it will become a routine and then I'll never go. Not exactly a good routine. So I need to be careful.
But.
If I know with enough warning that disruption is coming? Or if I knew that there wasn't going to be a routine? Or if I knew that there was going to be a semi-permanent change in routine, like the transition from semester to summer?
I'm fine with that. 
I might not choose to do it all that often, but give me a good enough reason and I will.
Without a reason to do otherwise, though, I'll do the same thing, day after day or week after week. It's always the same, day after day... Same enough that I don't need to think too much about it, anyways. That's the point of a routine, and it lets me do ALL THE THINGS.
No, really.
My senior year of high school, my routine for Thursday was: 5:00am wake up, get ready for school, 6:15am leave house on bike, 6:25am arrive at school, 6:30am "Independent Study" in East Asian Philosophy (there were 12 of us...) 7:30 my first "real" class starts, 1:50 school ends, then I think it was math team, then homework, then eat dinner on the bus to swim team, then swim, then bus back, then ride bike back. I'd get home at around 7:30pm, eat, shower, sleep. 
And I managed it.
Except that time that swim was cancelled and I was really confused and didn't know what to do with the rest of the day.
Oops.
Or that time last week when my Chinese teacher thought that changing up my tutoring schedule was a good idea. Yeah, multiple meltdowns, thankfully none in front of her because she doesn't know I'm Autistic. I'd been meeting for the same two hour session all semester, and then she decided that it needed to be twice a week, not one long session. We'd been doing it as one long session because that was the only way to make our schedules work, but noooooo. We had to break the routine and try to find a non-existent other time, and it's been chaotic ever since and I've melted down and it's bad.

More Upset, More Targeted, Both?

Trigger warning: r-slur (censored), bullying

ThAutcast does seem to give me a decent bit of post fodder, which is cool. ThAutcast also links to me on occasion, so I guess we kind of interact. This time, the status that got me thinking is about bullying.

Why might someone on the spectrum be more upset by bullying then a non autistic peer?

There are many, many reasons that an Autistic victim of bullying could be or appear more upset by any given bullying incident. It's not exactly news that our body language can be hard for neurotypicals to read, and we could appear more or less upset than we really are. We could be already overloaded by the time the bullying happens, and so it could be the final straw for a major meltdown. It could be that we don't understand why we were targeted.

Or... maybe we seem more upset because we're reacting to more bullying and less support.

Maybe we're the favorite target, and that means we have more incidents of bullying to deal with. Maybe it's more often. Maybe it's more severe. Maybe the bullies are getting bolder and bolder as our teachers turn a blind eye. Maybe we're taking the bullies at their word when our neurotypical peers can detect what is exaggeration and what needs to be taken seriously. I know that all happened to me. 

I know that when I was in third grade, I was called a r***** on a weekly basis at least, sometimes more. I know that I was chased around the playground by people who insisted that they were going to take me captive and blow me up with a bomb. I believed them. But the teachers thought it was a game, and nothing was done. My terror was thought to be faked, I suppose? Or maybe they couldn't read my body language. There was a slanted ceiling in the classroom where I had language arts. I hit my head on it every day. (I might be dyspraxic on top of Autistic. Just saying.) My classmates made fun of me for it. My teachers made fun of me for it. They could have changed my seat to one of the ones where I couldn't hit my head. They didn't. 

Some of my friends have heard the story of the worst day with that. I... I lied a bit on it. The final book didn't fall off the bookshelf from my knocking the bookshelf. After watching me bump and crash into things and hit my head on the ceiling every day, there was one day when I crashed into more things than usual. Head to the ceiling, then elbow to the table as I knelt to get my books, back and head to the bottom of my chair, back to the bookshelf, elbow to the bookshelf. And then my teacher hit me (gently, but still) over the head with a book, while I was still on the ground, wincing from all the others. Yes, I hit my head on the ceiling again when I stood up a second time. He laughed. When I got back to the main class, I told my main teacher. She laughed too, just as she had all the times my own clumsiness had been the final cause. (Yes, this was a different classroom that about ten of us were in, which was about a third of the grade.)

I've since been told that it was an "advanced" class that I was in, but I don't know that my classmates knew that the people getting pulled out were supposed to be more advanced. They might have? It didn't stop them calling me r*****, either way. The fact that I got 100% on all my spelling tests for the first almost half the year didn't stop them either. The time that I was math challenge champion by default, when I was the only one who got it right? That didn't stop them either.

Nor did my teachers stop them.

Even when they started stepping on my feet, my teachers didn't do anything. Nothing. When I stepped on their feet back, finally, on the last day of school, I was the one who was spoken too. Not them, me. 

Or they imitated my jumping and flapping as they called me r*****, or they imitated the way that my hiccups made me jump, insisting all the while that it was on purpose. It wasn't. My hiccups still make me jump, and I've got about twice the mass now that I did then. 

Maybe we actually do get more upset, I could believe it. But maybe, just maybe, we're taking more bullying and having more people as sources of bullying (remember, the teachers are doing it too and turning a blind eye to the students!) If there is more bullying to react to, there can be more upset without it being more per amount of bullying. 

Speaking, Reading, Writing

Landon of thAutcast is asking questions on thAutcast, gathering information. Some of them, I am answering here.
This is the first one being answered here:

 Learning to read or write or speak can be very hard for some autistic people and very easy for others. What was it like for you? You can talk in general terms or tell the story of learning one thing.

 (If you're not Autistic, you can answer about an Autistic person you know. I am Autistic, so I can answer for me.)

1.
I had no problems learning to talk. In fact, I was an early talker. Reading took a little longer- I could read at least some from an early age, but it was slow and I wasn't great at it and I didn't like it for a long time. Eventually, I did start liking to read. That happened as I got better at it.

2.
Writing, though.
Writing was the bad one.

3.
I started using computers for the first time around the same age that I was learning to speak, and I loved them from the beginning. I have always been good with computers. There was just one problem.
I was expected to learn to write by hand.

4.
In kindergarden, they gave us pencils and taught us to spell. My handwriting was the large, clumsy handwriting that you would expect of someone just learning. I was fairly good at spelling, and I was writing slowly enough, big enough, that it could be read. No one demanded more than I could do.

5.
In third grade, they taught us cursive, and then expected us to write everything in cursive. It was even slower than print, though no messier.
I was frustrated.
I couldn't read other people's cursive.
I couldn't write fast enough to keep up with my brain, even more so than usual.
They said cursive was faster.
They were wrong.

6.
In fourth grade, they let me print again.
I haven't done an assignment in cursive since.

7.
In fifth grade, teachers started to care that my handwriting remained horrible.
It had shrunk to a normal size, but no one could read it.
They said I was lazy.

8.
In middle school, we could type our homework.
Typing took practice, but my teachers could read my work.
I could read my work, even weeks later.
It took most of middle school for typing to be as fast as handwriting, but it was more than worth it.
My writing could be understood.
In-class essays stayed painful, but I could do my homework.

9.
In high school, in-class essays were even fewer.
Creative writing was a class.
I took it.
We met in the computer lab.
Everything was typed.
That's when I learned I love to write.
Not when I had to write by hand, but when I could get the stories out in a way I could read again later.
The computer taught me to love writing.

10.
In college, I was banned from handwriting my math homework.
My handwriting was that bad.
It still is.
That's what computers are for.