Hiya, you can call me medvedev. I’m 13y old with ASD. Recently my parents renovated bedroom where I (before renovation and my parents) and my sister sleep. I cloud say that it is my ¨comfort zone¨ since there’s my computer which means I’ve spent most of my time there. I know that they’ve renovated it for us (me and my sister) to feel more comfortable but now it feels unnatural to be in it. It doesn’t have same feeling attached to it. It feels kinda uncomfortable to be in it. It’ll take some time for me to adjust to it… is it just me or and some of you feel resistant to changes in your ¨comfort zone¨?
-medvedev-
Yeah I hate changes that others do. Small stuff like changes in a cabinet will grind on me when I open it. Sometimes I need change to my space but only when I’m the one doing it.
For sure! If someone else made the changes, yeah. I like reorganizing my own room, but if someone else did it I wouldn’t be too happy at first.
I was diagnosed as an adult. For the evaluation, the psychologist had me gather information from my parents on how I was as a child. My uncle said that I hated people touching and moving my things when I was a child, so I definitely had issues with people changing up my comfort zone. I would get argumentative and have what were probably meltdowns. Eventually, they stopped doing this, and we didn’t have problems with that anymore.
Later on as a adult before diagnosis, I had a friend that was in a bad relationship while I had recently gotten out of one. I remember that I was telling him the benefits of living alone. One of the benefits I came up with was that I went to the kitchen, got a glass out of the cupboard, and placed it in the very middle of the living. Then, I pointed to the glass and said, “You see that glass? If I don’t touch that glass for 2 weeks, that glass will be there in 2 weeks.” My friend looked at me like I was silly, I guess because that was more of an autistic thing than an allistic thing, but the point is that I really don’t like people moving my things without my consent. It’s like my mind has learned to survive by creating an inventory and map of where all my things are, so when the inventory and map are altered without me knowing, that survival mechanism is disrupted and I feel something like danger, vulnerable, exposed, unprepared, etc. I think it’s a normal autistic trait in how we function.
Definitely! The cleaning ladies at work unintentionally move things on my desk often, and I have to move them back as soon as I’m back there.
Maybe try to find things to add or change to make it feel more natural to you. Are there things in particular that would change how you feel about that space?
