Emily Paige Ballou has a pretty terrific look at one of the obstacles autistic people can face that other people often simply don’t realize is a thing: transitions. It’s one of the first things I blogged about post-diagnosis, where I tried to simplify it into seeing that switching from one task to another isn’t two things, it’s more like at least five things—and each takes resources. Ballou offers several examples of ways in which an autistic person might try to adapt their environment to account for this task-switching obstacle. Transition challenges mostly fall under executive function issues, although I remember liking the reframing of it into autistic inertia, a term Ballou does use here. What’s interesting and somewhat new to me is the specific idea of motor transitions and the resources involved there; I’d been thinking of task switching purely from the standpoint of the mental inertia when you’d think with my fatigue issues I’d have thought about it at all from the standpoint of the physical question, too.
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