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3:08pm August 3, 2014
Anonymous asked: Your recent discussion of special interests makes me wonder - I'm autistic, but when I have a special interest/obsession, I don't really feel compelled to seek out new information. I mostly want to go back over the same thought patterns about it over and over and over. Mostly my special interests are fiction and/or specific themes or dynamics. Or, that's what I thought. Do you think that that's a type of special interest, or something else?

Wow I thought I answered this.  I bet it was still being answered when my computer crashed and I had to reboot.  It was a long answer, and the answer this time around may not be as detailed.

Basically:  Having a special interest is like stimming.  There’s no single way to do it right, especially since they’re defined by people looking at us from the outside and then deciding we have a special interest or that we’re stimming.  (Some have even tried to say the two are two versions of the same thing – that “high functioning people have conceptual interests and low functioning people have sensory interests that manifest as stimming,” I’m… not kidding.  Although I’m glad the concept of a sensory special interest exists, because I have a lot of those.)

Anyway, you don’t have to want to learn anything new.

It’s all about intensity, focus, or both.  If your interest is really intense, it’s a special interest.  If the focus is unusual, it’s a special interest.  And other things too, even beyond those two ideas, those are just the two most common ways to tell.

I used to know a kid whose special interest was also his savant skill:  He had every telephone pole (or was it power pole?  whatever those poles with numbers on them in cities are) within a certain geographic area memorized.  He spent all day long writing maps that showed the number of each pole.  Giant maps taking up giant pieces of paper that he carried around everywhere.  He didn’t do anything in particular with them, he just thought about them all the time and that was his life and he was fine with it.  He didn’t learn anything new about them, either.  He just went over the same old information over and over.

I was the same with music.  I would get a single song, like “Don’t Pay The Ferryman” by Chris DeBurgh, and then I would play the tape over and over until either the tape or the tape deck broke.  I would also hum, whistle, and sing it constantly.  I was really annoying to other people during these times.  But I didn’t learn anything about Chris DeBurgh, I didn’t learn anything about the Greek mythology that the song had been taken from (although I liked the idea that it was from Greek mythology), I didn’t expand my knowledge in any way, I just played the song over and over and over ad nauseam until everyone around me was thoroughly sick of it, and sick of me.  And I had no idea why I was the only person with a capacity for listening to songs over and over, and nobody else seemed to be able to handle it.  I didn’t even question why I was the only one.

So learning all about something is one manifestation of a special interest but it’s not necessary for something to be a special interest.  All it takes for something to be a special interest is the degree to which you’re interested in it, and also if the focus is really strange.  Like if you’re not interested in dolls, and you’re not even just interested in Barbies, but you’re interested in how to style the hair on three particular Barbies from a particular year, and nothing else about those Barbies, or Barbies in general, or hair in general, or dolls in general – that’s an example of an unusual focus.  Unusual intensity is just the way it usually takes over our lives and takes up as much time as we can possibly give to it (even if some of us resist that to an extent in order to go to school or hold jobs… and others don’t resist it and suffer the consequences).  And again those are just the diagnostic criteria, they aren’t the end-all and be-all of what a special interest is.

My current biggest special interest is crochet, and I’m always crocheting something, I’ve always got several projects going at once, and even other fanatical crocheters are shocked how much I get done, because sometimes I don’t even sleep because I’m too busy crocheting, day and night.  I’m in an offline crochet group that meets once a month, and people are always shocked how much work I bring in every month to show them.  Because the intensity is there, the need to constantly be doing it, I feel sort of aimless and depressed almost if I’m not crocheting or am between projects. So I try to have several projects going so that when I finish one I can always jump to another.

Hope this was helpful.