ABSTRACT
While some autistic people are overtly rigid in many ways, others can be highly flexible in some contexts and highly inflexible in others. Rather than looking for ubiquitous inflexibility, we find it helpful to look for islands of rigidity, which can take many different forms. These can include routines and rituals, difficulty with change, trouble transitioning from one activity to another, black-and-white thinking, obsessive thinking, having an unusually strong moral compass, rigid rule following, interpreting language literally, and difficulty parting with seemingly useless objects. Autistic people offer logical explanations for their preferences for predictability and sameness, such as difficulty with executive functioning, desire for efficiency, avoiding the extra work required to prepare for something different, providing a stable foundation from which to explore new things, minimizing sensory overwhelm, and finding comfort in knowing what to expect. Autistic females may internalize their discomfort with change and are thus highly vulnerable to being obsessive and perfectionistic in their thinking and approach to tasks, and this often manifests with persistently high stress levels and anxiety.
