Routine and Orderly Things

From a young age, this is one of the more obvious symptoms of autism. Lining up toys. Asking the same question. Watching the same movie. Eating the same thing. Becoming extremely upset over small changes in everyday events, like being out of Lucky Charms. This comes from the need for unchanging, repetitive schedules.
lining things up is a bit similar to OCD (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder) in that it comes from the need for things to be just so. When I played house with my various toys as a child, it was never tea parties and adventures. Instead, I would gather many small plastic toys and make them act out life on tight schedules. Even my earliest memories of Barbies worked on a schedule. I would often create extremely rigid systems in which families of toys moved through life on rotational schedules. After a few tweaks, I had a system that I could theoretically use until the end of time with no changes to the schedule at all. This repetitive cycle wasn't for lack of imagination. I had a huge amount of toy hamsters, and I made for each a name, personality, and history. Despite this, all I wanted to do with them is to move them through the cycle. This was my version of lining up cars. I just got a certain satisfaction from seeing everything mentally lined up, order in everything. It's like working in a garden and getting that feeling of accomplishment when you see that there are no more weeds left. Doing it any other way bored me as much as my rotational schedule would have bored neurotypical children.
I wasn't one of the children that ask the same question over and over until my parents were all but ready to leave me on an orphanage doorstep, but many are. Asking the same question and getting the same response over and over is soothing to many people with Asperger's autism. Nothing unexpected, everything lined up.
Some people wonder why autistic people get so upset over schedule changes. Imagine your mind as a road. Whether you want to walk, run, drive, or cycle, there's nothing in your way. Everything moves along normally at a proper speed. A schedule change is like your mental road suddenly becoming a corkscrew that would terrify even Sonic the Hedgehog. All comes to a screeching halt. When this happens, I find myself caught in a loop. I turn in circles, say the same thing over and over, and thinking the same thought. It feels like becoming a human record, skipping over the same word again and again because the next one can't be properly read. For some reason, my mind just can't make it past the disruption.
For some people, success means their life is spontaneous. They suddenly decide to go bowling, or on a vacation to Hawaii, or to visit family in France. For me, success is repetition. I want a life of doing the same thing at the same time every day until the end of the world, the kind of thing that can drive most people out of their heads or into the depths of depression. I find it funny how what most people describe as being stuck in a rut is my favorite place to be.