It's funny, I exhibit some of those behaviours as well. I have a lot of "stuff" in my bedroom—in fact, everything I own—and I can lay my hand on anything very quickly. I too like things to be lined up and might be described as pathologically tidy. It occurs to me now that I've recreated my teenage bedroom but with hundreds more books and of course a computer on the desk where there used to be a typewriter.
Also, I have a routine, but my best days are when I
don't sit at my desk in my dressing-gown until I get the urge for lunch, then after lunch pick up whatever book I'm currently reading.
Husband has the larger of the two bedrooms (intended as a living room in our very small flat) and fewer possessions because a lot of his stuff is still at his mother's. We spend evenings there watching TV.
All that isn't much different from your routine, except in degree. The last psychologist I consulted tested me for aspergers and said I wasn't, although I exhibit a lot of those traits.
I never took to
Dallas but I'm a recent convert to
Friends, and with my TBI messing up short-term memory I think I'm on my fourth run through on Netflix and it still makes me laugh. This is when He's gone off for his bath. Luckily I'm a morning shower person, although since the coronahoax started it's been more like mid-day or even mid-afternoon.
In autism patterns show up like red lines. It became a case of doing my routine but almost popping out of myself to analyse what was happening in the context of psychology. Why the emphasis on rigid routine?
Almost everyone has a routine of some kind. We figure out the best way of doing something new and integrating it into the existing routine. This is why older people are described as "set in their ways". Mine being a mature marriage, both of us were "set in our ways" when we met.
As a side note, it was my second marriage but his first. I left him in great haste once and we had no contact for more than four years, although I thought of him every day and was not remotely tempted to have an affair. It was the head injury that brought me back. I was extremely muddled, and within weeks of coming out of hospital I realised I could no longer use my pushbike for getting about. It was a long slog on foot to get to the nearest supermarket and of course I had to shop more often because the bike basket carried more than I could.
Two months after the accident I realised I was helpless living alone. I knew beyond any shadow of a doubt that my husband wouldn't have started another relationship. Unlike me he'd attempted it, that being a male/female divide, but as he put it, "no woman would look at me". So when I made contact he went to the other side of the world to bring me back.
How can you leave someone who did that, with no recriminations? He's stopped asking if he can put my suitcase up in the roof, because under my bed it's good for storing rarely-used things. For decades I've slept with my big old suitcase under the bed, except for when I've slept on floors.
You mentioned living in the past. I call my autobiography
Flight Risk because in the structuring of it I realised I've had 62 addresses. Obviously a lot of them were very short hops, but I counted hotels only when I had no street address to return to. Sometimes there was stuff stored with friends elsewhere, often there wasn't; just the suitcase and me.
So when you write of living in the past, I think it's inevitable when there's more past than future, and when the present lacks the glow of memory.
Science refines things into ever smaller units, and "new" pathologies crop up all the time. For instance, PTSD was recognised (chiefly in the military) a long time ago, whereas I believe the attempt to get
Complex PTSD recognised is still going on. To me there's a world of difference between a one-off and often
impersonal trauma, and repeated trauma from a primary caregiver that sets people up for lifelong relational problems PLUS the inability to act on clear warning signs that puts sufferers into dangerous situations. (Panic and freeze, in my case.)
Aspergers is a tough one, too. My simplification is that people like my husband, and like you, have so much going on in your heads that routine is the vital background and interruption to it is experienced as chaos. It's all a matter of degree, from people like Daniel Tammet through Kim Peak to the classic
Rain Man who can't function alone in the world. Six years after my TBI I exhibit the symptoms of dementia. I'll walk into a room then stop dead, not knowing why I went there. I'm losing names of people I know well, of films and of stars, place names, and things my husband says he's now told me three times. I have to make notes for myself, or leave something out of position so I remember I need to do a particular thing. In conversation, if I make an aside I almost always lose the point I wanted to make.
I've accepted that I'm never going to be a best-selling author (OUCH) and I'm writing
Flight Risk so that when my memory's gone altogether I'll know where I've been, who was around at the time, high points and low points, why I moved on again. Incredibly tedious for anyone else to read (like my enormous rambling posts here), but I actually believe I'll be able to read and
write to the end. I've told my husband, who swears he'll never put me into a nursing home, that if I cease speaking altogether he should hand me a notebook and pen...