I Am A Sloth And I Like It

‘Do you have a routine?’ I was asked this by a friend recently.

My instinctual answer, was ‘no’.

I said this, because I work for myself, from home, and every day is different. But as I thought about it more, I realised that I was answering from the construct that routine means ‘daily routine’, and this gave me pause. Why did I automatically associate a routine with 24 hours? And why did I feel some shame around answering ‘no’? After thinking about it, I realised that I do have some elements of daily routine, and that, I do have routine, but much of it doesn’t happen daily. I ended up describing a ‘weekly cycle’. And I’ve been thinking about routine, time and cycles ever since.

As an Autistic ADHDer, I have a seemingly contradictory need for sameness and novelty. It’s why I can eat kiwis for breakfast every day for a year, and then feel like I never want to see a kiwi ever again. Now they’ve been replaced with apples and I’m trying to mix it up with Palestinian dates to try to avoid the too-much-sameness trap of doom. I have routine, I need routine, but I also need variation. As someone who experiences a strong Pervasive Desire for Autonomy, I also need to do it all on my terms. The thing is, I’m actually describing most humans here. Most of us need sameness in some areas of our lives, novelty in others, and all of us have a desire to act from our agency - we are just taught that where and when these things occur should be dictated by the systems and authority figures around us - rather than ourselves and our natural needs for each of these things. We have been conditioned to believe that all humans have the same cycles and that these cycles are necessary. Not only necessary, but that there is shame in not conforming to these cycles, leading to feelings of guilt and inadequacy if performing them is difficult or impossible, or simply not right for us.