Samefoods Can Change

There’s this autistic (and maybe elsewise) idea of samefood, wherein one of our robust defaults is to do just what it says: eat the same food all the time. That doesn’t always or necessarily mean that these tastes never change, however.

(Samefood is one of those terms that make me feel like autistics are conceiving themselves as cutesy cartoon characters, but I’ve resigned myself to being unable to change established autistic culture.)

This weekend I’ve rearranged my meals scheme—or schema, or whatever—for at least the duration of winter.

• Breakfast has switched from a bowl of Special K Protein and rice milk to a bowl of steel-cut oats with chopped walnuts, raisins, and cinnamon.

• Lunch has switched from a bowl of brown rice, diced ChiQin, chopped broccoli, sweet corn, and Old Bay seasoning to the toasted turkey, provolone, spicy brown mustard, and shredded lettuce on whole wheat sandwich I’ve been having for dinner.

• Rather than moving the rice bowl lunch to dinner, I’ve switched dinner to rigatoni, mild Italian sausage, grape tomatoes, sliced mushrooms, and arrabbiata sauce.

To be clear: things have changed but each of these becomes in effect the new samefood for each meal until and unless something prompts me to make further changes down the road. Some people have the same samefoods for years, while others can switch things up now and then on long timescales but still be having the same things every day between those changes.

That latter change to dinner is the only thing to have gone right and gone smoothly all day, and arguably in fact at all for the past three days. Technically my anxiety meds are an antidepressant, but they for damned sure haven’t been acting as such this week since right now my neurochemistry has shit for brains. I’d like very much not to wake up into this again tomorrow.